The stories recounted in this week’s Irish Times series on people’s personal experiences of the housing crisis will feel painfully familiar to many readers. One woman spends six hours a day travelling to and from work. After months of searching for a rental property, a young couple resort to applying for permission to build a log cabin in a parent’s garden. Another couple take on a derelict home, enticed by a refurbishment support scheme that proves far more bureaucratic than they anticipated and struggle to cope with spiralling building costs. The parents of young children are obliged to leave their Cork home because no childcare is available. And a family faces the prospect of spending two more years in a single, bleak hostel room.
These people’s aspirations are modest. But Ireland has become a place where earning a wage is no guarantee of a home. Infrastructure groans under the strain, families lose precious time, and climate goals become ever more implausible.
Rather than having its expectations realised, this generation finds itself navigating a labyrinth of scarcity, compromise and forced improvisation. What is striking is not just the scale of the crisis but the hardships and humiliations it inflicts: long commutes that swallow entire days; adult children whose independence is postponed indefinitely; families forced into patchwork solutions because nothing better is on offer from either the market or the State. These are not exceptional cases. They are everyday reality.
We are told that the housing shortage has many causes. Construction costs have risen sharply; planning systems are grindingly slow; land is held by owners who wait for greater gains; investment funds treat homes as assets rather than shelter. All of this is true. But taken as a whole, it represents a colossal structural failure that makes normal life feel like a privilege denied to too many.
RM Block
What links these stories and should worry the political establishment is the quiet erosion of trust. People do not expect miracles. They do expect that when government pledges solutions, those solutions will materialise in ways that make lives easier rather than harder. Instead, they see a planning regime riddled with delays and housing targets falling far short of what was promised.
There is no single fix for a crisis this deep. But there is a clear imperative: treat housing as a social foundation on which the success or failure of the State is built.
Last month’s budget included measures to stimulate private investment, but the Government’s housing plan has been delayed three times since the summer. When the plan does finally emerge, it is debatable whether it can overcome the justified scepticism of those caught up in the crisis. They will only be won over by implementation and delivery.
