Who are buying all the new houses?

but the state wouldnt be competing for labour since we have unused capacity.

the state also has its own landbanks and the means to service them, so its not competing for any resource. This is how you decrease prices, by increasing supply.

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2026/01/02/new-record-high-of-almost-17000-homeless-including-5321-children/

Number of homeless children in the state has gone from 300 to 5,321 since 2011 when FG took power

An increase in child homelessness of 1671%…

Potentially a case to be made by some in this thread that the introduction of the avocado to Ireland has had some of the most devastating societal impacts of anything in recent decades

Al

All those parents eating too much avocado toast.

And you think that enormous increase in homelessness in the last decade is down to a coincidental abandonment of responsibility on behalf of parents and nothing to do with failures on part of the government in numerous policy areas related to housing?

The government in that time have both constrained supply by failing to build adequate numbers of houses, while simultaneously stoking demand by pursuing immigration policies that have led to massive rapid increases in population over a short time.

And throw in the fact that a lot of the new houses built in Dublin anyway were taken by people who used to live in demolished flat complexes like Ballymun, O'Devaney Gardens, Dominick St, St Marys, Fatima Mansions et al. Tens of thousands of people.

They're building 550 new homes where St Teresas was for example. Loads of them will be people relocated so they're not net "new" homes really.

X number of builders = x number of houses built.

Thats not true at all though - we have in the past produced far far more housing output with a similar labour force. Labour is not a bottleneck on housing delivery right now, infrastructure (water, electricity) is. And infrastructural deficits are 100% the fault of government.

We were building fifty thousand or whatever it was units in the nineties because we had a practically limitless supply of workers from the east.

There's housing shortages in half the developed world. More workers would obviously mean more houses. There's only so much a construction worker can do in a day,if there's three,three times as much gets done.

No one was calling for more housing from the crash to at least 2016 because there was an over supply and both prices and rents were on the floor. There was no issue with parents having children with no means to provide for them finding accommodation in the private rental sector paid for by the Government, not least with the amount of accidental landlords from the celtic tiger era. Everyone was happy with the situation.

What happened? The economy exploded from 2018, the first year we had a budget surplus in a decade, people moved to the cities, especially Dublin where the vast majority of those now in emergency accommodation resided, both Irish and immigrant. This raised rents but also clearly gave landlords a choice of who they rented to, and those in receipt of rent allowance got pushed out for whatever reasons. It is a simple fact of life that in an open and democratic society those who can't compete end up marginalised. We all signed up to this, a burgeoning economy benefits everyone, including those in emergency accommodation because they get it for free thanks to those who contribute.

The claim that the Government should have foreseen the above is nonsense, you didn't either, and the less said about pursuing immigration policies (which is false) the better as that is just xenophobia.

What i would contend is that every single housing policy this century has been a disaster, from section 23 relief through outlawing of bedsits, restrictions on apartment sizes (which they're now undoing), help to buy schemes, RPZs, BTRs, and restrictive tenancy laws, all of which have served to reduce housing to a commodity. But from the early 2000s most people here view it as such, no one wants the value of their asset to fall and for housing to return to it's primary function of putting a roof over one's head, so prices will continue to increase. We have ourselves to blame, no one else.

This in a nutshell exposes the fallacy of left wing ideology, a thriving economy is a bad thing because some will be left behind. Better for society to have everyone struggling because then everyone is 'equal'. It has always failed and always will.

Yes it's completely xenophobic, you're attempting to conflate immigrants who are legally entitled to be here and who contribute to the economy with those who have been determined to not be.

It is not the fault of said immigrants that John and Mary can no longer find rental accommodation that they couldn't afford in the first place without Government help. Irish people have also moved into said accommodation while they work, why don't you have a problem with them?

I know nothing about this case of whataboutery you brought up. If boyd barett is against something I'm usually for it though. Let's hope there was no xenophobia involved anyway, eh?

“Student” visas, and abuse thereof is one of the larger components of non EEA migration yes (60,000 issued last year)

Three polls in the last couple of months have shown the overwhelming majority of people (>70% in every poll) are dissatisfied with the government’s mismanagement of migration. Most of the single issue anti migration candidates are extremists, I wouldn’t vote for them either - thankfully the more establishment parties are copping on, hence Jim O’Callaghan’s recent measures.

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/sunday-independentireland-thinks-poll-at-a-glance-sinn-fein-rises-coalition-stumbles-immigration-unrest-and-how-much-will-you-spend-this-christmas/a1090016523.html

You have that arseways, I said Irish people are the responsibility of the Irish state, I don’t expect other random non EU countries to be obliged to house our people. That should go both ways.

Now back to the actual issue, can you explain how increasing demand for housing with influx of hundreds of thousands of people doesn’t affect prices for the general populace? It’s junior cert economics

I think something needs to be done about property speculators.

My sympathy with the "accidental landlords" that were just speculating in property and then had to let them out when the crash happened is not massive.