Ireland's Housing Crisis: Why Irish Citizens Must Be Prioritized

We are losing our country one spare room at a time.

The Government's Housing Plan: A Closer Look

While the Taoiseach stood in the courtyard of Government Buildings today launching “Delivering Homes, Building Communities 2025-2030” with the usual fanfare of hard hats and glossy brochures, the truth sat outside the gates: Irish mothers and fathers, born and raised on this island, sleeping in cars with their children because there is nowhere left for them to go.

The new plan promises 50,000+ homes a year. Good. At last.

But buried on page 187 of the 220-page document is the quiet admission that will break Irish hearts: a full 20 per cent of all new social and affordable housing output is already earmarked for international protection applicants and Ukrainian refugees. That is one in every five homes built with your taxes going, by deliberate policy, to people who arrived yesterday—while Irish citizens born in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Donegal rot on housing lists for a decade or more.

This is not charity. This is displacement.

We are not a hateful people. The Irish know exile better than most; we have always opened our arms in times of famine and war. But there is a difference between generosity and self-erasure. When the State tells a young Irish couple—both working, both paying sky-high rent, both with Irish-born children—that they must wait longer because hotel rooms must first be emptied of new arrivals, something sacred is being broken.

The Unspoken Numbers: Homelessness in Ireland

Look at the numbers the Government doesn’t shout about:

14,740 people are officially homeless in Ireland tonight— the highest figure ever recorded.

Over 70 per cent of them are Irish citizens.

More than 4,000 are children with Dublin accents, Kerry accents, Belfast accents.

Yet in the last 12 months alone, the State has contracted or purchased nearly 30,000 beds for asylum seekers and programme refugees—beds that could have housed every single homeless Irish family twice over.

This is not an accident of policy. It is a choice.

Whose Communities Are We Building?

The new Housing Plan speaks beautifully of “building communities”. Whose communities? The Irish have a right to ask. Because the communities being built in many towns now are not the ones our grandparents knew. Walk through Ballymun, through Longford, through small towns in Mayo where entire apartment blocks have been handed over lock, stock and barrel to people who have never paid a cent into the system that built them. Irish kids see that. Irish parents feel it in their bones. And they are angry—not because the newcomers are foreign, but because their own flesh and blood are being told, in the country their ancestors died for, that they come second.

We were promised this would never happen.

We were told emergency accommodation was temporary.

We were told the housing crisis would be fixed “for all who need it”.

Instead, we watch Irish pensioners choose between heat and food while the State pays private landlords €2,000 a month, per room, to house people who crossed Europe safely to get here.

Enough.

A Call for "Irish Citizens First"

If the Government is serious about “Delivering Homes, Building Communities”, let it start with a simple, revolutionary act: Irish citizens first.

Operation Teach Baile: A Concrete Proposal

Put a moratorium on allocating any new social or affordable home to anyone who has been in the country less than five years—full stop—until every Irish child is out of emergency accommodation and every Irish family on the housing list for more than five years has a key in their hand.

Call it “Operation Teach Baile”—Homecoming.

Take the 20,000 units already promised to IPAS and refugees and hand them instead to the Irish families who have waited longest.

Take the €12 billion and build the homes on the land we already own, not on green fields sold off to vulture funds.

This is not cruelty. This is survival.

A nation that cannot house its own young has no future.

The Cost of Inaction

Tonight, somewhere in this rainy republic, an Irish child is falling asleep in a hotel room paid for by strangers, while strangers sleep in the home that should have been theirs.

That is not compassion.

That is the slow death of a nation.

It is time to put Ireland’s children—our children—first.

Because if we don’t build homes for our own, there will soon be no Ireland left to build them in.