Who’s To Blame For The Housing Crisis?

There are over 15,000 people homeless.

People are angry, of course we should be. The ordinary person in the street will get angry at the housing situation unfolding in Ireland and will look to find someone or something to blame. There is quite literally a battle on to win the hearts and minds of working-class people and the far-right know this.

Look up and place the blame on the shoulders of the rich, the vultures and their pet politicians or look down and direct anger at someone living in a tent on the streets. That’s the choice.

Over the last few years the far-right have managed to stir up hate and racism in working class communities. People’s legitimate anger at being left behind by successive governments has allowed the far-right to exploit that anger and twist it, direct it at other disadvantaged people.

Migrants have been placed in emergency accommodation in working class areas that already lack basic services. Such decisions by the government are deliberately divisive. The establishment plays a sly game to undermine any opposition to their polcies - and the far right play along.

The far-right are targeting temporary accommodation where refugees and asylum seekers are staying, claiming that they’re “illegal”.

Let’s get some things clear here nobody is “illegal”- once you enter Ireland you’re processed through the asylum system, therefore you’re fingerprinted and vetted (more on that later). Also, it is not “illegal” to seek refuge or asylum here in Ireland so by that definition, and to state as such, is simply a blatant lie.

The far-right also keep repeating the same phrase over and over: “Unvetted, foreign males of military age”. This is a meaningless sound bite used to cause fear and distrust of migrants. Again, given that these people are processed through the system and checked against international databases it means they’re not “unvetted”.

Military aged males, where to begin with this one?

I, the writer of this piece, am what one would consider to be a “military aged man”. If I worked in the private sector, I would technically be unvetted too. We need to be honest about the terminology, it’s designed to be divisive.

It’s designed to whip up fear of foreigners. It’s a blatant racist dog whistle term used to try to make us fear “foreign” men, as if “foreign” men are more of a danger than Irish men just because they’re foreign.

Which brings us to the next point.

The murder of women in Ireland has been linked, by the far-right, to migrant men. The majority of women murdered by men are murdered by men they know, in their own home. The issue is of violence against women, not migrant men against Irish women or anything like it.

The far-right speak about migrants as being a danger to women as if the problem of violence against women didn’t exist in Ireland before immigration. Of course, this is nonsense. Gender based violence, sexism and misogyny are all linked to a system that treats women like second class citizens. Sexism and misogyny is ingrained in society.

Furthermore, the far-right do not care about “protecting women”. The same people are vehemently opposed to abortion rights and want to drag us back to the dark ages of Catholic Ireland, of abuse and cover up, where a woman’s place was in the home and her societal role was to make babies and be subservient to her husband. That is the reality they want, don’t fall for their nonsense.

One of the claims by the far-right is that migrants are being housed before “our own”. In conversations with one friend, this writer was told that “foreigners stay in a hotel for a few weeks then they’re given a free house somewhere”.

This is completely baseless and untrue and the person making this claim couldn’t back it up in any way. It was pure hearsay and such lies are spread to reinforce racist arguments. It’s completely untrue because there are literally no homes available for anybody.

Now let’s look at the causes of the housing crisis and how we got here in January 2025.

At present in the 26 counties, there are somewhere in the region of 166,000 empty homes. Ireland’s biggest landlords are Vulture Funds. Developers, along with Vultures and local Councils are sitting on huge land banks and they’re allowing whole housing estates and apartment blocks lay empty.

Why you may ask? Well, if you sit on land long enough, as a crisis deepens, the value of that land goes up as available land becomes scarcer. It is quite literally manufactured scarcity, a by-product of capitalism. The motivation behind this is pure greed - all for profit!

When you have a government made up largely of landlords then you have a vested interest in the commodification of the housing market meaning that it’s in the interest of landlord TDs to ensure house prices and rents go up. In the lifetime of Fine Gael’s 12 years in government, the housing crisis has reached record levels, but the problems began way before this.

They started running down the stock of social housing in the 1980s - to drive people into the arms of the private housing market. The destruction of working class social housing estates was accompanied by demonisation of our estates.

As Ireland came out of the darkness of the 1980’s there was an upturn in the economy meaning more working-class people had a little more money than before. This was seen as an opportunity by Fianna Fáil to move people from council homes into private homes with starter mortgages.

The perceived “upwardly mobile” working class people got council mortgages in sprawling suburbs and moved to private housing estates. In their absence council estates were filled with poorer working class families who had lived in poverty in the inner cities and who were ravaged by unemployment, poverty and drugs. All these legacies of the terrible 1980s.

This ghettoised some areas that already lacked basic necessities and compounded many people into generational poverty. As some people’s material circumstances got better as the 90’s rolled on, councils allowed people in council estates to buy their homes if they wished.

They drove people out of our estates and demonised those who stayed.

There is of course nothing wrong with this - there were few other alternatives. However, this led to local authorities selling off social housing stock. Why is this important though? Because councils never replaced the stock they sold. They never built council areas to the same level they had in the previous generations.

Housing in the 90’s became privatised, and the availability of council homes became more scarce. These political, neoliberal decisions of past governments have led us directly to our current housing crisis. It’s important to understand this as it gives context to why we have a housing crisis.

When they bailed out the banks in 2008 house building collapsed again and the state refused to provide supply. We ended up with a country littered with ghost estates that could have been homes.

That’s why the far-right hashtag #IrelandIsFull is something that must be tackled too. Ireland is not full. With 166,000 empty homes, there are enough homes to house everyone who is homeless, everyone in emergency accommodation, everyone on waiting lists, everyone in direct provision etc, with tens of thousands of homes to spare.

Of course, acquiring these homes is a legal minefield and would take years as our laws uphold the rights of Vultures and venture capitalists above the rights of individuals to have access to a permanent home. It would take a radical upheaval to overcome those barriers.

There’s no quick fix, certainly not as long as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil continue to cobble together governments with a vested interest in the commodification of housing. But this doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

The only thing Ireland is full of is empty homes, derelict homes, hotels, Vulture Funds, venture capitalists and greedy landlords. We’ve had a housing crisis for decades and, as outlined above, it’s root cause goes back to the 80’s. The current crisis has been made worse by 12 years of Fine Gael ruling with the help of Fianna Fáil.

Migrants haven’t caused the housing crisis, successive governments have.

But what of those who are stirring up this vitriolic abuse aimed at the less fortunate? While some locals have been won over in different communities by the far-right, it’s evident that the far-right are the main instigators in every community. Online agitators and their supporters are travelling from different parts of the country to whip up hate.

The explicitly fascist National Party are some of the instigators. Their members are known for violence and model themselves on Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts. The NP were founded by Justin Barrett, a former prominent member of Catholic fundamentalist group Youth Defence.

The NP have a small support base, as exposed in all the elections they have ran candidates in so far, but their influence is far-reaching online through baseless lies and anonymous accounts. They’ve one councillor elected - one too many!

The Irish Freedom Party, run by Hermann Kelly are another group at the heart of these protests. Kelly is former editor of the Church run newspaper The Catholic and, despite claiming to be an “Irish Patriot”, was press officer for right-wing charlatan Nigel Farrage.

Again, the IFP is small in numbers, but their online activities are similar to that of the NP. They also have one councillor.

Both groups know how to whip up hate online. They’re aided by Gript, who’s main editor, John McGuirk, is a well known right-wing commentator and perpetual posh boy loser having been on the wrong side of numerous significant social movements in recent years.

Theliberal.ie is another website that helps spread misinformation, lies and fear. Leo Sherlock, the founder of this far-right website, comes from a not-so-delightful family who all dabble in the dark arts of far-right politics.

So how can we counter this constant barrage of hateful lies?

We need to be firm and constantly point to the real enemy - the government, the vultures, the corporate landlords and the capitalist class. They’re the enemy of migrants and refugees and they’re the enemy of the working class. Their drive for profit and their desperation to gain more financial capital is to the detriment of human progress.

We need a united front, a cross section of society made up of, but not exclusive to, working class community groups, trade unions, radical-left political parties, social democrats, sports clubs, social clubs etc. to mobilise on housing and to confront the far right.

We need to challenge these racist liars head on, both on social media and on the streets. We need to show strength in numbers in the face of hateful protests and we need to be consistent in our arguments and be assured in our solutions. The role of revolutionaries within this movement cannot be understated. We have the convictions to win over working-class people to our arguments.

While more than 15,000 people are homeless, while 166,000 homes lay empty and while Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil remain in power, there is no political will to get a solution to the housing crisis. There is another way and it’s not through hate and division, it’s through solidarity, struggle and socialism.