{"id":345607,"date":"2026-02-19T16:07:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T16:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/345607\/"},"modified":"2026-02-19T16:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T16:07:11","slug":"landlords-complaints-are-proof-public-bodies-cannot-win-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/345607\/","title":{"rendered":"Landlords\u2019 complaints are proof public bodies cannot win \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recent complaints about the Residential Tenancies Board<\/a>\u2019s (RTB) social media<\/a> posts are proof that public bodies cannot win.<\/p>\n

The Irish Times reported on Monday that the Irish Property Owners Association<\/a> (IPOA), a representative body for landlords, wrote a letter of complaint to the RTB about social media videos it posted in September. <\/p>\n

The videos were part of a social campaign designed to appeal to young people, but the IPOA claimed they portrayed landlords as \u2018unscrupulous\u2019<\/a> and in an \u201calmost comical or farcical\u201d light.<\/p>\n

The tenants\u2019 rights videos each began with a sketch depicting a landlord opening the door to a residence before making a demand of its student residents. The demands were unreasonable, but sadly appear not uncommon among the rental market. <\/p>\n

The students\u2019 saviour then steps out of the background and advises them, and the audience, of their rights. The result was effective and clearly engaging.<\/p>\n

The tenancies board said the campaign, with its \u201clight humour\u201d, drove an 83 per cent increase in traffic in comparison to its previous campaigns. The RTB\u2019s two most recent posts on Instagram have a combined 471 views, whereas the first video of this series alone had more than 33,600 views.<\/p>\n

Following Tuesday\u2019s article, the landlords\u2019 body called for the videos to be deleted from the RTB\u2019s social media accounts.<\/p>\n

It is entirely understandable that landlords, blamed for many failings of public policy around housing and often rightly criticised, would feel the reels \u201cvilify landlords\u201d and call for more \u201cbalanced messaging\u201d.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s be real here, the social media posts by the RTB were funny. What is more, they are exactly the type of content which will appeal to students.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Residential Tenancies Board grants almost 1,000 applications for legal help over three yearsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The hook of the caricatured landlord will grab the audience\u2019s attention as they doomscroll through Instagram, so that they learn their rights to protect themselves from the few abusive landlords giving the sector a bad name.<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether the content will upset interested parties, Cantillon hopes that public bodies exercise some freedom in coming up with genuinely engaging content such as this.<\/p>\n

State bodies need to be braver in the style of content they use if they are to engage young people\u2019s notoriously short attention spans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recent complaints about the Residential Tenancies Board\u2019s (RTB) social media posts are proof that public bodies cannot win.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,2355,18,19,17,162480,4097,41275,1114],"class_list":{"0":"post-345607","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-cantillon","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-irish-property-owners-association","14":"tag-renting","15":"tag-residential-tenancies-board-prtb","16":"tag-social-media"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116098160541951463","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}