When your skin isn't white and your accent isn't local, many landlords won't even give you a chance at accommodation. And, writes Quentin Fottrell, prejudice in the housing market can be extremely difficult to prove
Isaac Opanubi was looking for a house or flat for over a year. While his wife and two young children lived in a bed and breakfast, he stayed with a friend in Phibsborough, Dublin. But after countless viewings, a suitable home eluded him. Sometimes after he viewed a house, the landlord said he'd phone - but he never did. On other occasions, Opanubi knew by the landlord's face that he wouldn't even be considered.
"I know that look," he says. "The landlord might say the flat is gone, even if I'm the first person to view it." He has tried social housing, but he has friends who have been waiting for as long as he has been searching for a flat in the private rented sector.
"In London you can get a council flat, but here there are not enough council flats or houses to go around. I just pray that God will answer me now," he says.
Like many landlords he has had dealings with, you may not have met Opanubi or even heard his Nigerian accent on the telephone. But, chances are, you already know that his skin is black. That fact alone, he says, rules him out of many flats or houses. "Those who haven't had any direct contact with coloured people before may think: 'Who are these people?' But we have come here without invitation and we have to face that."
The amount of foreign nationals who believe they were discriminated against is rising, according to Louise Mullen of the housing advice agency,Threshold.
"We have anecdotal evidence foreign nationals are discriminated against," she says.
She also believes tenants and landlords are slowly becoming familiar with tenant rights. And the sooner, the better. Some unsuspecting people have also been getting misinformation from landlords, Mullen says. "In one case at our Dublin office, the landlord told the tenant that every house in Dublin has rats. The tenant actually believed him. In fact, he came to Threshold on a totally different issue.
"It's more frustrating when someone is told that a flat is gone because of the colour of their skin."
While many landlords are more interested in the colour of your money, stories of discrimination are not going away, according to Chinedu Onyejelem, editor of the multi-cultural newspaper, Metro Éireann, set up for foreign nationals living here.
"Some landlords don't care if you are green or black or white, if you are a student or welfare recipient. Others, however, do," he says. He has had reports from people who were told a flat was gone when they arrived but, when they hung around, found others were admitted.
Sometimes, he adds, flat-hunters don't get as far as the door. "It's not always a question of being a refugee or black or white. When they hear your voice, they are able to say, 'He or she is a foreigner', and tell you that the flat is no longer available."
The sequence of events is crucial to understanding the complex nature of why a tenant is chosen or rejected. And it's not always foreign nationals who believe they get the short straw. Sybille "Billy" Spinola, a film studies graduate from Dublin, got the heads-up on a spacious ground-floor two-bedroom Georgian flat with a garden. She was recommended to the estate agent by the outgoing tenants. So she thought she was a shoo-in.
"I contacted the estate agent first," Spinola says. "When I told him I was interested on the phone, he said: 'That's great! Come down so we can meet you and discuss the lease.' He was perfectly happy with me on the phone. We spoke on a first name basis. He just knew me as Billy. When I went to see him, he happily explained the terms of the lease. It seemed like a formality."
But, she alleges, the conversation took an unusual twist: "When I told him my name was Sybille Spinola he put his pen down, looked up at me and said: 'Do you mind me asking you, are you Irish? That name's not from here.' I said: 'No. My name is Italian. My mother's Irish. My father's German, but has an Italian name.' He said: 'I'm not racist. Call me old-fashioned. I think Dublin should be filled with Dubliners.'
"As soon as he asked me about my surname," she adds. "I knew that I wasn't going to get the flat.
"I asked if that would make a difference," she says. "He replied: 'No. I can hear from your accent that you're basically Irish'."
When she told him about her son, he said he'd call her by the end of the month. When she heard nothing, she called him. But he had already given the flat to a couple, the other party recommended by the outgoing tenants. "He said the flat wasn't right for a child," Spinola says. When she protested, she says the estate agent told her that it was his job to find "suitable" tenants and, despite being first in the queue, it was a "toss-up".
The Equal Status Act 2000 outlaws discrimination on nine grounds, including race, gender, marital status - and family status. The other grounds are age, disability, sexual orientation, religious belief and membership of the Traveller community.
But asylum-seekers such as Isaac Opanubi find it the toughest to find accommodation, says John McDermott, manager of the Refugee Information Service. "They are at a particular disadvantage, especially as many have rent allowance. Some people are just not prepared to rent a flat to you if you are black. Racism is a reality and is very difficult to prove, unless you are prepared to set up a sting operation."
He cites a black family who were given notice to leave a house, only to discover that the house was re-let to an Irish family within two weeks. Nor was the decision to evict the first family based on economic grounds. Both families qualified for rent allowance. Without adequate investigation into such cases, McDermott says, taxpayers are handing disreputable landlords "a blank cheque" to do as they please. In fact, since the Equal Status Act came into being last October, it has been getting queries relating to all nine areas of discrimnation. Patrick O'Leary, of the Equality Authority, believes a few high-profile cases will certainly help the cause.
"Under the Act, we also have powers to investigate, interview the landlord and look at documents. As with all new Acts, it will take a while for people to exercise their rights," he says.
But it still remains relatively easy for landlords to give tenants - unsuitable or otherwise - notice to quit without giving a reason, if there are no safeguards against this in your lease(four weeks' notice is standard.) And, unlike many other countries that have rent control, landlords can currently raise the rent by as much and as often as they like, unless the lease says anything to the contrary.
So why do some landlords overlook foreign nationals? Is it tantamount to the "No Blacks, No Irish" signs of 1950s London? Not according to one thirty-something landlord. Although he didn't make any specifications about tenants in the newspaper advertisement for his two-bedroom apartment in Ranelagh, his rule of thumb was "no weirdos, no smokers". He also wanted someone Irish in order to avoid "people passing through". (He is not, incidentally, one of the 7,000 members of the Irish Property Owners' Association.)
"People can be cavalier and tell you they're leaving after six months," he says. "Contracts are not really enforceable. It's difficult to get a guarantor from someone with no family in the country. What good is a letter from their dad in Munich? They could just scarper home if there was a problem. It's worse still for someone from further afield."
Some student tenants spending the summer overseas, he adds, are prone to making the rules up as they go along. He knows from experience. "When I was in Boston for the summer, a couple of us went to see a place; and as soon as the landlord disappeared, a bunch of students descended on the house. Of course, we thought it was funny at the time, and didn't mind crowding into a house, but now theshoe is on the other foot.
"My apartment has a residents' committee," he says, "which would be up in arms over that kind of behaviour. I also avoided the usual selection of weirdos and undesirables who might have wild parties or act strangely.
"One guy looking at the flat typed my answers to his questions in his palm pilot! Others expected me to provide bedclothes. If they can't afford a pillowcase, how will they afford the rent?"
Naturally, unpaid rent and bills top the list of worries that plague landlords.
But Fintan McNamara, of the Irish Property Owners' Association, says that, contrary to the beliefs of some landlords, it's difficult to chase tenants who may abscond in the dead of night, regardless of their origins. Court proceedings are costly, and it's just as easy to disappear in Dublin as it is in, say, Dubai.
"It makes better sense to just cut your losses," McNamara says. With about 34,000 foreign nationals and another 8,000 asylum-seekers living in Ireland, McNamara believes cases of discrimination are relatively small. But, he agrees, even one case is too many. "You will find landlords who won't take this nationality or that nationality. There are problems, for example, with the cooking from certain parts of North Africa. Strong spicy smells don't normally appeal to the neighbours."
Still, he says, overcrowding can be a problem: "Romanians are regarded as particularly adept at it. They make up a sizeable portion of asylum-seekers and tend to help each other out, like the Irish in America years ago. But the problems we have here \with discrimination\ are identical in Europe.
"Human nature doesn't change across the world. As tenants, we find that foreign nationals are no better or no worse than the natives."