Séamas O'Reilly: The generational human catastrophe of the housing crisis

"68% of all people between 25 and 29 living with their parents is not just suboptimal on a human level – it signals something deeply, deeply wrong with the way our society is ordered."

Protestors gather outside Dail Eireann in Dublin for a rally highlighting the housing crisis in 2021. Photo: Damien Storan

Eurostat announced last week that 68% of people in their late twenties in Ireland live with their parents. 

This is a statistic so jarring, it bears a closer look. 

68% of all people between 25 and 29, (73.9% in the case of young men) living with their parents is not just suboptimal for those people on a human level – I’ll go out on a limb and presume their parents may not be wild about it either – it signals something deeply, deeply wrong with the way our society is ordered.

I’m not here to write a screed about the landlord class or predatory rentals, or the bizarre reality that the housing crisis appears no closer to a solution, despite being the number one issue talked about for the past ten years.

Quite frankly, I don’t think my blood pressure could take it, so instead I’ll just say this: Even if you were the most capitalistic ogre ever devised in the underground bunker of a South Dublin think tank, what do you think happens in a society where young people are all-but-excluded from major financial decisions? 

I picture staff in Woodie’s DIY, ten years from now, slowly realising no one has bought a shed or a hammer in six months, with peoples’ prospects of home ownership remote and their entire incomes weighted toward saving for said prospect. 

As with babies in Children of Men, might we slowly realise that young, financially secure adults have simply stopped being made? 

Or, as with babies in Children of Men, might not the same happen with, well, babies, once the opportunities for procreation involve doing so in a room
filled with childhood dolls and mid-00s premier league posters?

At 37, I’m ten years older than the people in that cohort. I left Ireland when I was 25 and, like all Irish emigres, my wife and I used to spend a lot of time talking about moving back. 

Actually, it’s possible we talked about it more than we thought about it, but we did that a lot; basically any time we were in the company of other Irish friends who’d done the same. 

Each person or couple would have their own lightly sketched theory of return; a seaside bolthole, perhaps, or a tiny flat somewhere near their old stomping grounds and – never spoken but quietly presumed – offer Irish accents to their English children.

Even ten years ago, these were stunted aspirations, something small, something to begin with, something nearly-there.

Our own timid little dream was similarly mild. Our point of return would most likely be Dublin, where my wife is from and where her family, my kids’ nana, grandad, and cousins, still live. It was probably a few years ago that I realised the tenor of these conversations had changed a bit.

More and more, it seemed like these tender daydreams had taken on the stature of absurd, boastful fantasies. 

To rent or own a modest house suitable for a family of four seemed roughly equivalent to betting all our hopes on living in the penthouse suite of the Eiffel Tower. 

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

We were kindly, but patiently, warned off by almost everyone we know back home, many of whom had grown to have careers and families but were still nowhere near owning their own house, or a rental that was stable and fairly priced.

We watched as those peers got evicted or priced out of their rentals – some twice within the same year – and, in very few cases, struggled to find, let alone buy, a place of their own for anything like a price they can afford. 

I say “very few cases”, not because such occasions are rare, but because I have so few peers who are even actively pursuing home ownership. 

The people I know in Ireland who’ve bought houses in the last few years have been very well-established professionals, with careers in law, finance, and those weird jobs whose titles are made up of business nouns so vague they could just as easily be an accountant as an arms dealer or a spy; management consultant, accounts representative, senior project developer, etc.

The bulk of my friends work in lower-paid professional roles or as carers, nurses, charity workers, writers, musicians, or artists. All rent. There used to be more of them, but most left Ireland over the past 10-15 years.

Increasingly, the career flight path between Ireland and everywhere else seems less a corridor and more a valve; once you’re out, an ingenious little monetary lever slips in behind you, making it more and more financially implausible that you’ll ever return. 

With no small amount of shame, I’ll admit that the first thing I knew about Ireland’s housing crisis was that it was, at the root, why I didn’t live in Ireland anymore.

The reason I feel shameful is this. About five years ago, my friend Rachel started a Christmas gift-giving drive for unhoused children in Ireland. 

I wrote about it at the time and was shocked to discover the numbers she described. There were, at that time, 9,700 homeless people in Ireland. 

She described the precarity of their situation, the fears and worries she encountered every day in her day job with a homeless charity.

I recoiled at my own petty grievances, and how privileged I was to count my half-formed desire to move back to Ireland as a big problem. 

As of this January, that number is 11,754, having risen for seven consecutive months, comprising 1,609 families and 3,431 children. 

The thin end of the housing wedge has fallen on these people, these children, to a degree that will see little amelioration from saving, finger-wagging, or government schemes aimed at helping people like me, maybe-just-about-nearly afford to live in a home of our own.

We can think of the housing crisis in terms of emigrants’ reluctance to return, or young men’s likelihood to buy sheds. 

Or we can see the human catastrophe being wreaked upon tens of thousands of people in front of our eyes. Whichever it takes to move the needle, it’s long past time.