Owen Keegan to head RTB - Another big win for landlords
By Patrick Flynn
The news that former Dublin City Council Chief Executive Owen Keegan is taking over the reins at the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB), the public body with responsibility for registering tenancies and regulating the residential rental sector in Ireland, on an interim basis comes at a time the body is in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. Keegan’s predecessor as RTB director, Niall Byrne, acknowledged last year that its poor staffing levels has led to delays in registering tenancies and replying to public queries, while its data collection on tenancies has also been criticised – last year the Central Statistics Office reported that there were approximately 84,000 more homes in the private rental market than the RTB had stated.
But who is Owen Keegan? And what has his record been in his previous role overseeing Ireland’s largest local authority? This article will let him speak for himself.
With a background in public administration, economics, and civil engineering, Keegan worked as an economist for DKM Consultants and Davy Stockbrokers before commencing a series of posts in Dublin City Council and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. From early on, his controversial policies faced opposition from trade unions representing local authority workers. In 1993, his changes to how Dublin City Council collected council rent caused Dublin City Council workers to go on strike, while at his initiative Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown became Dublin’s first local authority to privatise waste collection. In 2013, he was appointed Dublin City Council Chief Executive, a position he would hold for the next decade despite ongoing controversies.
But what of his attitude towards the housing crisis? On leaving his post in 2023, a Sunday Business Post profile described him as having been ‘vociferously against’ the idea that local authorities should build large-scale social housing and quoted him as saying: ‘The bulk of house-building responsibility will rest with the private sector. There’s no way I think the state can.’
Keegan has long been dismissive about housing activists who have taken action against the housing crisis in Dublin. In 2016, he said of the Apollo House occupation that the homeless were being ‘used by those with their own agendas’ and that ‘celebrity endorsement’ was the main reason the occupation had gained attention. In early 2019, he claimed Dublin’s homeless accommodation was such an “attractive option” that some people would not want to leave it, and later criticised those who provide tents to homeless people for encouraging rough sleeping, claiming they were ‘virtue-signalling’.
In 2021, a self-described ‘sarcastic’ remark by Keegan in a letter to UCD Students’ Union about purpose-built student accommodation put his record on housing into the public spotlight once again. In response to the union’s criticism of the inaction in building student accommodation, Keegan stated to Ruairí Power, President of UCD SU, that the union should itself build ‘lower cost student accommodation for its members’. Keegan refused to resign after a protest by Dublin students and calls by People Before Profit and others for him to do so. Taoiseach Michéal Martin and Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien called on Keegan to withdraw his ‘facile’ comments – ironic, given it is the pro-developer policies of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Greens which ultimately has led to the student housing crisis. Their legacy is visible in the fact that vulture funds now own more student accommodation in the city than DCU, UCD and Trinity College combined, with rents far beyond the reach of most students.
Rupture has highlighted the underfunding by many local authorities on culturally-appropriate Traveller accommodation, Dublin being no exception. When the National Office of the Planning Regulator stated that Dublin City Council should identify new Traveller accommodation sites in the 2022-2028 city development plan, Keegan resisted this stating this was not a requirement. Dublin Traveller organisations replied by pointing out the council’s poor existing delivery of Traveller accommodation, Ballyfermot’s Traveller Accommodation Project stating “If you don’t set yourself a target you will never achieve it.” Keegan’s approach contrasts with the urgency of the Traveller accommodation crisis, with Travellers disproportionately likely to be made homeless.
While Keegan’s time in Dublin City Council is over, the housing crisis continues, and, as long as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael continue to dominate Irish politics, it will deepen. In the face of their landlord-friendly policies, we need to build a housing movement based on people power, supporting tenants facing eviction like those in Tathony House, and forming and growing CATU branches in our communities. This June, we need to elect socialist fighters to our councils that will take on the vulture funds – like People Before Profit Cllr Madeleine Johannson, who is herself one of the Tanthony House residentscurrently resisting eviction. We need a left government that fights for ecosocialist change to resolve the housing crisis, through the large-scale construction of retrofitted public housing built on public land. We cannot rely on ineffectual public bodies like the RTB when we and others in our community are threatened with evictions – we need to build our own resistance to this long-running crisis which continues to rage across Dublin and Ireland.