In response to my article on housing demand, a reader contacted me to make a number of interesting points. These were in relation to accommodation density and to the increasing traffic congestion that is evident around the state.
I had made the obvious connection between migration driven population growth and the rolling failures to meet the demand for housing. I suggested in another that the shortage of housing would continue to lend support for the less subtle suggestions that people with more rooms in their homes than they needed themselves might take in people or even ‘rightsize’ out of their own house altogether.
The reader suggests that a more informal system is in place to deal with the housing crisis. That includes examples where people engage in ‘doubling up.’ This he claims means that “there are far more people in the same number of houses.” Anecdotally that would appear to be the case and many people will be aware of rented and even purchased houses near them in which there are more people living in them than would normally be the case.
Interestingly, that does not seem to show up as a factor in statistics. Eurostat published a report on overcrowding on December 22 and it shows that 17% of people in the EU were living in overcrowded accommodation in 2024. The figure for the Irish state, however, was just 5%.
That is one of the lowest rates across the states reporting and compares to figures of over one third in some of the former socialist states of eastern Europe. Even so, the Irish rate is still less than half that in countries such as France, Germany and Spain. Italy is a standout in the more developed western European states with 24% in overcrowded conditions.
What is also clear, however, from the Eurostat figures is that the level of overcrowding and accommodation density in Ireland has significantly increased in recent years albeit from a low level. This at a time when the over all EU figures would seem to show that there is the opposite average trend across all member states.
While the EU average for overcrowding has fallen from 18% ten years ago, the figure for Ireland has almost doubled since 2018. It is not difficult to see that there is a connection between that and the greatly increased rate of inward migration that has led to significant sharing of the type described.
What constitutes overcrowding? According to the Irish Housing Acts a room is considered to be overcrowded if it has less than 400 cubic feet of free air space per person. Overcrowding also includes situations in which unrelated persons over the age of 9 of different gender have to share a bedroom.
Irish local authorities also use the EU standards which is the basis for the statistics in the Eurostat report. This is how social housing is allocated and requires that there be one room per couple; one per single adult; one per two teens of the same sex; one for other teens and one per two children under 12.
A married couple with an adult dependent living at home, four teenagers and two other children would be given a five-bedroom house. Such families are now rare but it is not unusual to have adult children still living at home and there are clearly situations where unrelated people are sharing the same rental and even purchased accommodation.
While there are statistics on the accommodation density in social housing, there appears to be almost none for the private sector. Not least of all because both or either the landlord or tenant would be in breach of regulations if there are more people stating in a house or an apartment that there are supposed to be.
I would tend to agree with our reader but other than the clue found in the doubling of the overcrowding rate there is nothing official really to back up what would appear to be happening where accommodation is being shared.
So, like much of what we know to be taking place our knowledge remains mostly subjective. Just as our senses would tell us that the demographic changes within cities and large towns would seem to be even more radical than is indicated by official population statistics. Something which our reader suggests is more clearly manifested in the direct impact on services.
That can be seen in hospitals and schools for example, but also in the much greater level of both traffic on the road and the overcrowding of public transport. The state itself has recognised traffic congestion as a growing problem in a number of reports including one the economic cost of congestion published in 2025 by the Department of Transport.
Despite the ongoing and planned interventions in transportation the Department bluntly concludes that “they are not sufficient to offset most of the increased cost which is driven by factors such as population, employment and economic growth.” All of this is the “unavoidable consequence of economic and population growth.”
I shall be returning to this but for the present it serves as another example of the fact that mainly foreign investment driven ‘growth’ employing increasingly predominantly non-Irish workforces is lowering the quality of life.
And it would seem that most of us will have little choice but to like it or lump it. The fact that the main beneficiaries are not Irish seems not to be a problem or even a consideration for those tasked with running the Irish state. I have said this before, but there is something deeply amiss about such an attitude. Maybe that’s just me in my dotage.