Housing in Ireland Is Broken

"Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry wanted to show me another side of Cork.

Mr. O’Connor and Ms. Sherry moved to Cork, a city in the south of Ireland, in 2018 after a two-year stint in the Netherlands. They were immediately struck by the number of vacant and derelict properties they found. (In Amsterdam, Mr. O’Connor noted, if a building is empty for more than 12 months, the council can order the owner to take a tenant.) They started a project photographing empty properties and posting them online. Altogether, they said, they found some 700 empty properties within about a mile of downtown.

I met up with them a few months ago for a tour of Cork’s empty and derelict buildings. Our walk started in Shandon, one of the oldest areas of the city and the site of the former Butter Exchange — at one point in the 19th century the largest butter market in the world. We moved across the north of the city before descending toward downtown Cork, which sits on an island between two channels of the River Lee. They showed me properties with “For Sale” signs that looked like they’d been there for a decade or more. Others looked hastily abandoned, with ancient plants forgotten on the windowsills. Some properties at first appeared vacant and in disrepair, but then there would be some hint — a cracked window, a light on — that someone was quietly living there.

There are various estimates of the number of vacant and derelict properties across Ireland. All are in the tens of thousands. The 2022 census recorded well over 100,000: long-abandoned rural cottages; empty apartments in city-center blocks or above shuttered shops in regional towns; fading Georgian townhouses in the center of once-prospering rural villages; and “ghost estates,” housing developments that were being built at the time of the financial crash in 2008 and were never completed.

At the same time, Ireland has a housing crisis that is severe, persistent and deep-rooted. The average rent in Cork increased more than 10 percent in 2023. Dublin, the capital, has become one of Europe’s most expensive cities to rent housing in. Two-thirds of the country’s 18- to 34-year-olds are living with their parents. This year homelessness has reached record levels.

So how did a country with tens of thousands of empty buildings end up with a housing shortage?

In the late 1990s, Ireland was booming. It had emerged as a gleaming example of the potential benefits of deep liberalization for a small, open economy. Tax cuts and deregulation transformed the nation into what the academic Conor McCabe described, in his book “Sins of the Father,” as a “glorified offshore bank.”

For a while, a lot of people did very well. Private construction flourished and landlords were encouraged to purchase rental properties as investments. House prices more than doubled. People were offered 100 and even 110 percent mortgages — why not buy a new car to park outside your new home? But when the economy imploded, in 2008, real estate prices plunged, many people defaulted on loans, and tens of thousands of homes were left unfinished.

More than 15 years later, many of the developments have been completed; on others, construction has restarted. But some still sit quietly amid overgrown roads and gardens, like film sets for some postapocalyptic drama.

Ireland’s economy and home prices have rebounded, but homeownership has not. By January 2023, the average house price in Dublin was nine times the average wage. Building has not kept up with demand, and tens of thousands of people are on waiting lists for social housing.

For people looking for homes to live in right now, near family or work, the situation has started to feel like an emergency.

Different people have different answers for how we got here. Ireland’s two main parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, which govern in a coalition with the Green Party, insist that they support homeownership. When Simon Harris took over as taoiseach, or premier, in April he promised to fix the housing crisis “once and for all” and build 250,000 homes in five years. The government has also taken steps to reduce the number of empty buildings, offering grants for renovations and creating a tax on vacant properties to discourage developers from hoarding.

But the level of need has created a space that both the left and the far right are seeking to fill. Sinn Fein, a leftist, nationalist party, won its largest-ever share of parliamentary seats in 2020 after making opposition to soaring rents central to its campaign. In local elections in June, candidates from the far-right and anti-immigration Irish Freedom Party and National Party, which argue that “Ireland is full,” won seats for the first time.

Ireland is hardly an outlier. Dissatisfaction with housing costs is high across rich countries and a driver of the far right in Europe. The Irish government must call an election by March 2025, and there could be a snap election as early as November. Who will win the argument over what’s at the root of this crisis and how to solve it? And if the anti-immigrant messaging of the far right can succeed here, a country that deeply understands what it means to leave home in search of a better life, what does it mean for elsewhere?

One sunny day in March I drove down a stretch of the Wild Atlantic Way on the west coast of County Mayo, a popular tourist area with homes for sale with asking prices of more than half a million dollars.

I saw a small stone cottage stood flanked by sheep grazing contentedly, the hills behind it visible through the empty windows. There was no “For Sale” sign, no sign of occupation. It looked like it had simply been forgotten.

Rob Stothard is a photographer and journalist living in County Leitrim, Ireland." [1]

1. Housing in Ireland Is Broken: Guest Essay. Stothard, Rob.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Sep 6, 2024.