By Martin Murphy
The depth of the state’s ongoing failure to fix the housing crisis has reached a devastating new low. On Friday, 29 August, the Department of Housing reported that 16,085 people are condemned to living in emergency accommodation, with 5,014 children spending their childhood in homelessness being a part of this horrendous figure. These figures do not include the thousands of people experiencing hidden homelessness, or women who are living in domestic violence shelters.
Being evicted into homelessness is a deeply traumatic experience that severs people from their communities and sources of security. For the sake of landlords’ profits, tenants are evicted to raise rent, tenants are being evicted because they can’t pay the rent, and tenants are evicted so that landlords can sell their properties for enormous profits. Homeless children have their development curtailed by precarity and overcrowded family hubs.
Stress, shame and social isolation
These conditions lead to stress, shame, social isolation, and lives being cast into doubt. It is common for children in emergency accommodation to have to change schools due to large commutes. This heightens children’s sense of loss, for parents this can lead to depression and a sense of deep failure to their children.
As people’s lives are discarded into homelessness, Landlords and developers are lining their pockets with millions in profit. In 2024, the government spent almost €361 million on emergency accommodation. On top of this, the state effectively hands over an additional €525 million to landlords via HAP (Housing Assistance Payments), which again acts as another form of the Irish State’s system “corporate welfare”
At present, the state is in a deficit of 256,000 homes, an abject result of government failure to build adequate social housing and policies which rely on and reward private developers’ pursuits of profit over human need.
Year on year, the government has failed to deliver social and affordable housing, while developers are paid the full inflated market cost of new builds to be used as social and “affordable housing”. Developers such as Glenveigh and Cairn homes can boast of hundreds of millions in profits, while the large landlord Ires reit buying up properties to rent has recorded €16 million in profits this year alone.
Fundamentally, successive governments have been committees for managing the affairs of capitalism; notably, one-fifth of the Dáil is made up of landlords. In line with their conscious and unconscious class interests, the government is fully invested in supporting the logic of the market. An example is its outright refusal to establish a state building company, its removal of rent pressure zones in favour of indexing them to inflation, and its support for no-fault evictions. In line with this, its stated aim is to attract more private developers to Ireland.
System failure
It is clear that the housing crisis is not a result of failure in supply, it is a direct result of suppliers drip-feeding the market to cream huge profits at the expense of ordinary people. If we do not take immediate action, the number of homeless people will increase year on year. There are currently over 150,000 vacant properties and 700 public land banks in the state; these must be taken into public ownership. Nothing short of a radical mass movement on housing can solve this crisis. Our movement must demand immediate rent cuts and freezes, and a complete halt of no-fault evictions.
To truly tackle the housing crisis at its core we need a total break with capitalism and its profit motive. We must take private developers’ resources under democratic public ownership and control. All of these resources must be merged to build a democratic publicly managed construction company that can be used to construct high-quality quality universal social housing on public land with full participation of all those who will live in them. Nothing short of a socialist planned economy can truly end this housing crisis.
