General Irish politics discussion thread

Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and to a lesser extent the Greens and Labour have had opportunities in the last 15 years to fix housing and all have failed.

So it's perfectly understandable that any opposition party will look promising when it comes to housing...

They're a small party, quite new and have grown election on election. They fit in a space where they will never be a major party, and that's just fine.

Well you’d have to assume with it being one of the number one concerns of the voting public that the government parties aren’t in the business of sabotaging house building

Could it not just be ,to use Micheál martins phrase today re the flooding schemes,that there is no magic wand?

You can’t magic up the builders

You can’t magic away the nimby planning objectors

You can’t magic in the investment and you can’t magic out the foreign investors without harming supply

Even Mary Lou a couple of years ago at the height of her parties opinion poll popularity stated it would take at least 2 government terms to make inroads

You can bet your bottom dollar she knew full well then as she does now that none of this can be magic’ed

So we are left with lots of unrealistic policy waffle fodder from all sides when the solution is really simple,just keep going,keep building and do your best not to discourage the builders

I actually think that councils would be better auditing their existing stock. There are large numbers of people whose circumstances have changed who are still in council housing, even a TD on 120k is living in one. That is like bed blockers in hospitals, people who can well afford to rent or buy in the private sector, occupying a council house.

That is before you look at underoccupancy. Families can't get three and four-beds because there are single people rattling around their large houses.

No, housing is a bigger issue.

But immigration fuels the demand for housing, so to solve housing, immigration must fall.

By people stating that housing is a big issue, they are implying that immigration is too high.

My point is that the idea that Irish people will base their vote in general elections on where the parties stand on immigration clearly doesn't hold up. Anti-immigration parties and candidates were annihilated at the recent general election and European elections, so there is little evidence that this is a dominant factor when people come to vote. Voters are unlikely to be directly linking bread and butter issues like cost of living, housing and healthcare to immigration, hence parties like the Social Democrats doing quite okay in the polls.

You'd have to assume though that FF-FG will remain bedfellows for a very long time, even if they end up in opposition together. The only thing that would shake things up would be the emergence of a major new party in Ireland.

The issue is a lot more complex than that.

Various things create a need for housing, and the main one is population growth.

Several factors are involved in population growth, IMO the 3 main ones are a) people living longer b) births and c) immigration.

a) means that the turnover in the housing stock slows; but this is not new - longevity has been increasing for many decades, so as a factor it is not new.

b) the fertility rate has been below replacement for over 3 decades now, so this is not a major factor in the requirement for housing - although the part of the country where those births take place may be a factor. Against that, the very large cohorts of the late noughties and early teens are now beginning to look for homes, whether as students or as members of the workforce.

c) immigration - since the crash, we have added over a million to the population, and around half of that has come from immigration.

This is not an anti-immigration diatribe, but if we want to resolve the issue, we need to study it to find out what is happening. There is no point in hiding our heads in the sand and ignoring it. We need to ask some fairly basic questions, and mine are as follows:

What model of society do we want?
Is it to be one based on US companies (in the main) setting up here, and importing labour (directly or indirectly) to sustain them?
Is it acceptable to have a society where our young people have to leave to find a decent standard of life while importing cheap labour to replace them?
Who benefits from this model?

Clearly it is a good deal for MNCs, they get to pay low tax, and to choose who they want to employ regardless of origin: initially - in the 1950s to 1980s say - US companies were enticed here in order to provide Irish people with a livelihood. There was a clear benefit to us in terms of reduced emigration. That has now gone - we have a huge number of MNCs, mostly US, here now - but the model is broken in that we have both (Irish) emigration and (foreign) immigration at the same time. We are told that this is good for the "economy" - but is it good for society to see our children leave when there are clearly plenty of jobs available?

To return to housing, immigration - and let's not forget - airbnb - are huge drivers of our housing crisis. Banning airbnb & its clones would release a large number of properties onto the housing market. In other words, that thing abhorred by the Irish establishment - regulation - in this case, of the tourism sector. This is visible all over Europe, it's not just an Irish problem, but we must get past our phobia about discussing not so much immigration, but more so, the drivers of immigration as opposed to the immigrants who after all are people like all of us Irish who have spent part of our lives abroad.

Wow, that is such a messed up vision of the Irish economy that I don't know where to start.

The vast majority of IRISH citizens depend on US MNCs for their wellbeing. Whether it is bars and restaurants, shops and cafes, hospitals and schools, these are all funded in different ways by the US MNCs and their corporation tax and income tax.

There were 31,000 employment permits issues in 2025, the vast majority going to US MNCs for high-paying jobs.

There were around 128,000 students in English language schools in 2024. They end up working in the local newsagent or sweatshop in low-paying jobs.

The issue is far far different to the picture you paint.

You are correct.

With the rise of Aontu and Independent Ireland, you have two new parties who will not touch the likes of PBP and the Social Democrats.

That arithmetic means that it is close to impossible to see how a government could be formed without either FG or FF.

What is strangest of all is that the group most affected by the housing problems - those between 20 and 35 - are the group most inclined to vote for the Social Democrats, the party that will do least to help them.