A recent poll found that 75% of young people in Ireland say that they are considering emigrating because of the cost of living crisis, especially around the rocketing price of renting, and the lack of housing.
That mirrored a previous Red C poll which found that more than 70% of young people aged 18-24 are considering moving abroad for a better quality of life.
These findings recently brought EuroNews to Dublin to examine what they called an “unprecedented” housing crisis particularly affecting young people, who the reporter said saw themselves as having “no prospect” here.
Now-familiar statistics were examined, such as the enormous rise in rental costs – doubling in Dublin in the past 10 years – while the report noted that property prices were at record levels.
The EuroNews Witness piece described those most impacted by Ireland’s housing crisis – millennials – as “a generation sacrificed”.
In 2010, 60% young people aged between 25 and 34 years owned their own home, compared to just 27% who do now – a startling difference. One of the young people featured in the programme said she was thinking of moving to Berlin because she wanted to have “some semblance” of a “family life”.
That has become, it seems, a common theme. A CSO statistician, commenting on their Pulse survey in December 2022, said that “younger adults were concerned they couldn’t afford to start a family, with nearly three in ten (29 per cent) of 18 to 29-year-olds selecting this option – while “more than 57% of respondents aged 18 to 29 said they would consider emigrating to lower their cost of living”.
At a time when Ireland’s fertility rate is on the floor – in common with the rest of the countries that now make up a shrinking, ageing Europe – it should surely be a priority for policymakers to recognise, and tackle, barriers to young people having families.
Instead, we’re seeing growing numbers of young people emigrating again, and taking with them, not just the skills and smarts we need for our own economy, but their contribution to providing the next generation – the crucial asset that is probably, more than anything else, in desperately short supply.
Dr Rory Hearne of Maynooth University told EuroNews that the impact of the housing crisis was a generation of young people who were being “forced to emigrate again from Ireland”.
But neither he nor anyone else in the news piece pointed to the elephant, not just in the room, but crashing about it breaking the furniture: the impact of immigration on the availability of housing.
That’s one of those unpalatable truths: the kind everyone knows, that many people are unhappy or angry or upset about, but no-one dares to say it because we have become so bullied and cowed by the vast censorship complex – including media, NGOs, government and others – that it has become easier to say nothing.
But the numbers are undeniable, as is the pressure on the state’s accommodation resources and on available housing.
There are now 20,000 people who came here claiming asylum being housed by the International Protection Office in Ireland. In addition, there are 85,000 Ukrainians who have arrived here in need of housing and services.
The intolerable pressure of that sudden influx has had an entirely predictable effect on everything from healthcare, to child protection, to the tourism sector (facing a billion-euro loss this year while the government merrily continues to insist that, no, Ireland cannot cap the numbers arriving), and much more.
But that’s only part of the story. The reality is that immigration has been a factor in the housing crisis for some time, but its always been easier to simply blame government inefficiency (which exists in abundance) or supposedly greedy landlords, or vulture funds (who should be prevented, in my opinion, from buying mass lots of property in the country).
We know that, for 2016, the Department of Social Protection confirmed that 35% percentage of all rent supplement was paid out to non-nationals – both from within and outside the EU nationals.
At that time, as journalist David Quinn observed, “17% of the population is “foreign-born”, so immigrants are over-represented in the figures by two to one.”
He also discovered that 39% of those waiting for social housing with Fingal County Council were not Irish citizens.
That pattern has continued.
In March, Gript reported on a Freedom of Information response that showed that 53% of people receiving HAP from Longford County Council were not Irish nationals, and that 41% of those on the council’s housing waiting list were not Irish.
At the other end of the scale, Irish people are being priced out of areas of Dublin city, where their families might have lived for generations, by new developments which are largely housing the well-paid employees who fly in to work for Google and other big tech companies.
Matt Treacy’s analysis of the recent data released by the Census showed that some “71% of the increase in the population since 2016 is accounted for by people who are not of Irish birth”.
And he points out that the Census figures “suggest that the proportion of people living here who were born outside of Ireland is already over 20%”.
This is all happening in the context of the government’s burgeoning corporation tax receipts, which are, of course, only an indication of the health of foreign multinationals, and could, due to events entirely outside of our control, dry up at any time, leaving us in real trouble.
Yet the government – and the Opposition – continue to take this reckless attitude towards immigration: inviting the world to come here and obtain of generous benefits and free housing, and insisting that this small nation can take in unlimited numbers of people.
The growing numbers of young Irish people forced to emigrate don’t seem to matter much to them. As I have observed before, the Irish people are Paddy last in their own country.
For those leaving, other factors matter too, of course. Surging costs of living mean that when wages are not rising as fast as inflation, earnings can’t stretch as far for essential costs – with one estimate reckoning that Irish workers took a 3.9% pay cut last year in real terms.
And we also need to take into consideration the many hard-working people who have come here to make a better life and do so through the correct channels – because no-one objects to a measured, controlled immigration policy which takes the needs and culture of both those arriving, and those living here, into account.
But there is no escaping the hard reality that the housing needs of Irish people are clashing with the huge numbers increasingly coming here in an uncontrolled manner as the government refuses to take stock of the migration crisis.
And so we will have the absurd situation where our nurses are travelling to Australia, and our teachers to the UK, while we are told immigration is needed to boost our own workforce.
In reality, this actually means that powerful stakeholders often want to bring in cheap labour to boost their profit margins while migrant populations – including our own people – are separated from home and family and country, reduced to being cogs in the machine of the global economy.
We need to wake up to this reality. Our young people – and the generations that they raise and make possible – should not be forced to emigrate because the government’s migration policy has made it even harder for them to make a home in Ireland.
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