Many believe 'key workers' living in Dublin should be provided a rent allowance, new research has revealed.

According to a survey carried out by Red Sea Research and Marketing, 79% of Dubliners believe that this rent allowance should exist.

Dublin-based businessman Paschal Taggart told Lunchtime Live that he would be in favour of this initiative.

“My wife was a nurse, my mother was a nurse, my mother-in-law was a nurse, I was chairman of a hospital in Dublin,” he said.

“For every month, our biggest problem was, ‘Have we enough nurses?’ And if it wasn’t for Filipinos and Italians and foreign nurses, we could close the place down.”

Mr Taggart also said that he had multiple family members that had worked across the civil service, and he believed they had been “badly treated” due to the rental crisis over the years.

He said that ‘key workers’ should be defined as public service employees or those who cannot work from home.

Sad nurse standing in corridor

However, Jason Cullen from the Dublin Commuter Coalition said that this wouldn’t be such an easy task.

“Within those key workers, you have your service staff – the cleaners on the buses and the trains, you’ve got your special needs assistants, teachers, et cetera,” he said.

Mr Cullen said that investment into public transport services would be more appropriate.

“You have people moving from Drogheda and Naas – even further beyond – where the public transport services, they’re not there,” he said.

“They’re never going to be to an adequate level to bring in the mass amount of population that we need to – unless we get digging and boring tunnels like it’s going out of fashion, which isn’t going to happen.”

Over staffing

Listener Clare said that while this might resolve public service staffing issues in the short term, this would cause issues down the line.

“Why should you single out one sector over another?” she said.

“Then you’d have too many people going into nursing and there wouldn’t be jobs for them, and there’d be nurses coming out left, right and centre; or doctors.

“Every job should be filled to create a proper economy; as I said, it’s the private sector that creates the wealth.”

Clare said that anybody going to work and paying taxes is an essential worker.

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Main image: Man with many bills or invoices and no money. Alamy 2024