David McWilliams, The Ghost Of Malthus, Immigration And The Housing Crisis

Establishment mouthpiece the Irish Times has published a series of articles by the pop-economist David McWilliams that blame immigrants for the housing crisis. McWilliams thinks Ireland is full: we have too many people and not enough houses. Never mind that we had lots of people come to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger, yet had too many houses and a crash. Nor take heed of the fact that we had tens of thousands leave after the 2008 crash yet we had no extra houses.

McWilliams’s articles are an assault on the working class and for that reason (and no other) what he has written is worth looking at a bit closer. He offers three so-called “solutions” to the housing crisis:

His first solution (to restrict immigration) rests on the false premise that there is a problem of supply. It is also unworkable and irresponsible. He has no actual plan for how his second solution (increase supply) is to be carried out. His third solution (to let people build shacks in their back gardens) seems to be some kind of back of an envelope idea but I include it as it reveals his class interests.

All of his three solutions reveal his class interests. He never takes aim at the wealthy who profit from the current housing market. He never challenges the landlords, the corporations, the speculators. He never mentions the massive curtailment of state housing provision after the crash of 2008. He sees that we need change but the only change he sees is to limit immigration. Blaming immigrants lets the real enemy of the working class off the hook.

Restrict immigration?

The first problem with this “solution” is that it rests on the false premise that we have a problem with supply: “there are serious problems with housing supply, there is also too much demand, and this extra demand is increased by pressure from immigration”. In a country where there are at least 80,000 vacant and 20,000 derelict homes, there is no problem of supply, we have a problem of ownership.

Supply and demand in housing, as in the labour market, is a game. A game played out to drive up profits. The state built 8,000 social homes a year at the start of the 1980s, falling to 800 a year by the end of that decade. This was an intentional policy. The housing “hunger games” is very profitable right now. If we had a housing system based on need we could house everyone tomorrow. But that would involve - at minimum, compulsory purchase of vacant and derelict properties, clamping down on Air BnBs, coercion of property speculators, banning vulture funds and nationalising their existing properties, and setting up a state construction company to build the profiteers out of business.

Even if McWilliams thought such policies were desirable, he knows that he can’t sell them to the readership of the Irish Times. The ideas of Thomas Malthus, a long dead priest - who believed that the poor caused their own poverty, that the earth did not have the resources to feed everyone, and that overpopulation was the problem - are much easier to sell. McWilliams’s neo-Malthusian, anti-immigrant view - however false its premises - will be well received by his class.

The population of Ireland in the Stone Age was a few thousand people. If Malthus was right every increase of population should have seen us get progressively poorer. It’s ludicrous. With increasing productivity and population a country can grow to be more populated and wealthier at the same time. As Karl Marx once said “every pair of hands is a pair of hands that can work!”

The second problem is that McWilliams must know that immigration will not be reduced. Even if European law and international law made it possible to reduce immigration as he proposes, the Irish ruling class would not accept it for one moment. Immigrants comprise 18.5% of the workforce already; 75% of immigrants are employed. According to a monitoring report on integration published by the ESRI in 2025 migrant workers have lower incomes and are more likely to experience poverty and deprivation. In that respect they often occupy a last-in, first-out position. These workers are generating billions in goods and services.

Marx knew capitalists better than they knew themselves. Bosses often carry vain notions about themselves - that they are self-made or even that they’re doing the world a favour. But Marx knew that production and consumption by workers was the lifeblood of capitalism. From the point of view of the market place, competition is essential in this system. Profiteers need workers to compete for jobs and they also need them to compete for resources. This is clear when it comes to the housing market. There is nothing that private developers like Cairn and Glenveagh want more than to have queues of people desperate to pay any amount for a house. You can’t play the hunger games if you have no people to play it. Be in no doubt about what I am saying here: I am not blaming working class people for needing a place to live. The problem isn’t too many people. The problem is the landlords, developers and speculators and the state that acts in their interests, all of whom cooperate to keep supply down and hold people at bay, forcing them to compete. Profit needs competition.

The third problem with his solution is that it is irresponsible. He knows very well that immigration is, as he puts it, both a “threat” and a “treat”. He is well aware of the divisions in Irish society at the moment: “We see this class divide borne out in anti-immigration rallies. From a macroeconomic perspective, more people competing for jobs that are paid less will reduce wages at the lower end, while more people looking for cheaper homes in less expensive areas will drive up rents and house prices, reducing already fragile incomes.”

Wages under capitalism aren’t set by the whims of greedy bosses. It costs society a certain amount of labour to raise and educate a worker. If those costs rise, wages rise. Wages can rise while the population grows. Wages can fall while a population shrinks - as we saw when the Tiger collapsed.

On the same day that McWilliams published one of these articles an Indian worker was brutally attacked in Tallaght. McWilliams sees these things. Indeed he tries to soften his rhetoric with phrases such as “Ireland needs immigrants. This economy and society cannot survive without them…Ireland, on many metrics, benefits enormously from our hardworking and talented new citizens…it’s not their fault.”

But it all rings very hollow. It’s not the immigrants’ fault, he says. But it is the fault of corporations, developers and speculators. Does he mention them? Not a chance. Instead, he assumes the voice of the nation. “Adult countries make adult decisions about what is feasible, practicable and workable….Ireland is not even having the conversation”.

Seems to be that the conversation he says we’re not having is the loud conversation we’ve been hearing for a couple of years, a conversation that has shifted the political spectrum to the right and guaranteed Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael a path back to government during the last general election.

Ireland, he says, Ireland is the problem. Nonsense. This just hides who’s really profiting from the housing crisis. As it happens, this is exactly the same trick that Ministers for Housing use when they say that “we” are delivering housing. Samuel Johnston said that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. When it comes to housing, it’s the first refuge of the pro-capitalist economist.

We don’t expect McWilliams to call for the overthrow of capitalism. That’s the job of revolutionary socialists. It is no surprise that he takes aim at the state either - that’s just standard operating procedure for a right-wing economist.

But taking aim at immigrants when the real problem is corporations, landlords and speculators is more than just a bad take; it’s a dangerous one. He points at a surplus population of 86,600: “This final group is the only group over which the State has legal border control and this is where that adult conversation must begin”. It is not an “adult conversation” to stoke tensions in this way. It is nothing more than fusion of Malthus and Trump: his “solution” rests on a false premise of low supply, it will never be implemented, and it scapegoats the vulnerable while protecting the interests of profiteers.

Macroeconomic confusion - stimulate production by reducing demand.

Shut the door. Keep them out. What’s next? Increase supply, he says: “The solution must include a reduction in immigration rates and a simultaneous increase in home building” How? He is not clear. He’s just locked the door on potential building workers. Then he ties himself in knots trying to map out a for-profit market solution.

He says we need to stabilise prices: “Everything should be measured against the benchmark of whether it will lead to stable prices.” How does he expect a profit-dominated housing system to build more if prices are dropping? If McWilliams culls the immigrants, demand will fall, as will economic output in general. Will developers invest more capital into the production of houses in a falling market? That hardly seems likely. Developers like Cairn and Glenveagh currently make a profit of €50-70,000 per house. They’re hardly going to receive these musings favourably.

None of it makes sense. McWilliams is trying to preserve a for-profit housing system and reduce demand. You cannot do that. The only way that you reduce demand is by supplying houses not for profit, but to meet people’s needs.

Shantyism

McWilliams’s most recent article (2nd August) shows the limit of his vision. He says we should house people in shacks in back gardens. He calls this “Yimbyism”. (Yes in my back Yard). This should be called “Shantyism” and has to be the most quintessentially Fine Gael idea since “We Stand with Israel”. McWilliams can easily sell it to the readership of the Irish Times. You can almost hear the “ching chings” echoing around South County Dublin. This will lead to “pop-up” or “side hustle” landlordism quicker than you can say “Leinster Rugby”. As for where they’re going to get tenants after McWilliams stops the boats is anyone’s guess.

McWilliams says kick the immigrants out because we are at capacity. He is wrong. He says there is “a hard constraint of 35,000 homes a year or thereabouts”. Maybe this is some kind of thought experiment on his part, but there is no hard constraint on supply that cannot be removed.

As already noted, there are enough vacant and derelict homes right now to house everyone who needs a home. There is no “hard constraint” of supply - even if the 2022 census figure of 166,000 vacant homes is an overestimate there are more than enough homes available. There’s no need for Malthus unless you want to defend the interests of people who have multiple properties. Work on compulsory purchase and renovation of properties needs to get underway now.

Neither is there a “hard constraint” on the supply of workers. The first order of business is to set up a state construction company. This will attract builders, architects, electricians, surveyors on proper contracts.

Decent pay and conditions of employment would act as a pull factor, bringing more school leavers into apprenticeships and activating the tens of thousands of construction workers who still have not returned to the sector since the crash. These latter workers are part of the reserve army of labour. Under capitalism they are deliberately surplus, held at bay putting downward pressure on wages for the employed. A state construction company would provide decent, permanent jobs that would take that structural threat out of the system - undercutting the private sector employers.

There is only a “hard constraint” of supply of workers because private operators want it that way. They use the reserve army by not using them. There is no “hard constraint” in available land. The Land Development Authority has identified state lands where 69,000 homes could be built. Bypass the speculators, build it ourselves. Unless you want to defend the speculators and land hoarders.

What about money? Is there a “hard constraint” here too? There was a budget surplus of €23 billion last year. Vast fortunes of public money are already poured into protecting the profits of landlords, developers and speculators:

€1 billion per year direct to landlords in the form of HAP to keep rents high. The First Home and Help to Buy schemes put upward pressure on market prices. Tax breaks for corporate landlords who own nearly 40,000 rental properties and charge rents of over €2000 pm.

The Irish Strategic Investment Fund makes €140 million of taxpayers’ money available to private investors “to create new homes for the private rental market”.

The only “hard constraint” at work in McWilliams’s account of housing is the hard constraint of protecting the wealthy at all costs. He criticises the state but in truth his articles are part of the same class war waged by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. Setting different social groups within the working class against each other is the propaganda front of that war.

McWilliams compares the housing crisis to the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. That everything needs to be done to get us out of the mess. It’s fair to say that if he had been in charge of that operation, World War 2 would have ended in the west in 1940. He’d have allowed the private sector to evacuate for a profit and would have left the immigrants on the beach.

In the Summer 2025 edition of Red Star magazine I wrote about the divisions in the Irish working class caused by capitalism. I showed how people living in areas of high social deprivation are “surplus to requirements”. Either as low paid, partially employed, unemployed or emigrant labour, many in the blue collar working class have long been part of what Karl Marx called the “reserve army of labour”. The reserve army of labour is thrown out of work by cycles of innovation in production, which reduce demand for workers.

Strong relationships between migrant and non-migrant groups within the working class are crucial. We must not forget: the money interests of all workers on the one side and big corporations, landlords and speculators on the other are absolutely opposed.

Competition and antagonism between the Irish and immigrant working class makes life easy for the rich. They can lower wages and increase exploitation. They can increase rents and imprison families in decades-long prisons of debt. They can make you sweat blood to pay for health insurance. They can do all of this and more, and every time someone tries to divide the working class, the wealthy raise their glasses of Champagne in tribute.

Irish workers as surplus to requirements

Working class people are angry. Large sections of the class know they have been left behind. But this didn’t happen yesterday. The capitalist system produced an underclass long before immigrants came here in any numbers. A comment made in the Dáil in 1933 by Patrick McGilligan, a Cumann na nGaedheal politician (predecessors of Fine Gael) shows the utter contempt that the Irish wealthy has always had for the poor: “people may have to die in this country and may have to die through starvation.”

20th Century Ireland was a catalogue of misery for working class people. Tens of thousands of women incarcerated by the religious orders in collusion with the state. Hundreds of thousands cast out as emigrants - the 1951 UK census recorded 537,709 people who had been born in the so-called free state of Ireland. The Irish working class knows what it is to be a “surplus population” and forced to leave home.

Karl Marx knew it well, too. In his book Capital, he outlined how between 1851 and 1865 Ireland lost 1,591,487 people. Two years later, he famously described the antagonisms between the English and Irish working class in England: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life”

Marx saw up close how a divided working class benefited only the wealthy and crippled the workers. The wealthy did everything to keep the ranks of the active and reserve, the Irish and English, at one another’s throats:

“This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.”

What was to be done? For Marx there could be no question of an alliance between the English worker and the bosses. There could be no question of turning on the Irish immigrants either. He called for English workers to unite in struggle and for the English worker to support Irish independence:

“It is the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation”

Solidarity between migrant and non-migrant workers

The challenge for us in 2025 is different. Marx identified a particular relation between two parts of the working class. There are immigrants from all over the world here. As such, our solidarity with migrant workers must include clear anti-imperialist politics. Global flows of labour arise from the ruinous effects of the expansion of western, primarily US capitalism - and we must work to connect all of its moving parts - from hyper exploitation of labour to genocide and everything in between - to how the ruling class in this country operates.

So by fighting here, we fight internationally. Take the operation of the commodified rental market. Financial capital is transnational. Investments made in the United States seek their returns here. For example, the Irish government recently lifted rent caps at the behest of lobbyists for investment fund landlords. Now, the CEO of the biggest investment fund landlord, IRES REIT, Eddie Byrne, is in the media constantly rubbing our noses in his company’s increased share price and “opportunities for…acquisition”.

The wages of migrant and non-migrant workers alike will be drained away by this parasite. Our interests are identical. So, campaigning on evictions, maintenance, rents, deposits, informed by the global context is essential for building solidarity between migrant and non-migrant workers.

So, working class people are damn right to be angry. We have the right feeling. However, we must not get the wrong idea. The enemy is not other working class people. The enemy is the parasite class who exploits all workers; the landlords, the speculators, the corporations. And to be clear - the first rank of this enemy is the indigenous, Irish ruling class. One hundred years ago it was Patrick McGilligan in the Dáil calling for us to starve, today it’s Eddie Byrne salivating at the prospect of devouring our wages, sucking the life out of us.

Organic anti-racism

We can and must point the finger at the vile racists who stalk the streets with mobile phones on selfie sticks or turn up outside International Protection hotels to terrify immigrant workers. We must never forget Marx’s profound, internationalist, anti-racism: “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin”.

We give no ground to these social media-spawned cretins. But they only thrive where we have lost our base. We cannot leave working class communities to them. We have work to do: knocking on doors, campaigning on housing, school places, transport. Supporting strikes of Nurses, School Secretaries, Caretakers. Pressuring ICTU to use their power to organise the class, to seek to mobilise migrant and non-migrant workers in the gig economy.

The situation is urgent: the best time for us to campaign in the most deprived areas was before the poison of racism started to spread - the next best time is now.

Mainstream anti-immigration

If the only forces dividing the working class were knuckle-dragging “paytriots” things would not be so serious. However, anti-immigrant ideas are now appearing in the mainstream. This is much worse. For example, the performative cruelty of Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan’s deportation of immigrants sends a much more powerful and much more dangerous message. It’s now an official article of faith in official Ireland that immigrants are some kind of problem. Even Sinn Féin have decided to call for Ukrainian refugees to be treated just as badly as other refugees.

We won’t leave immigrants on the beach or in the lurch. Working class solidarity is the only answer to attempts to divide from below and from above from the likes of McWilliams.

Longer term, we need socialism. There would never be a housing crisis in a planned economy. And migrant and non-migrant workers together will achieve this. Immigration is not a crime. Neither is it the cause of the housing crisis. Every pair of hands is a pair of hands that can work and every pair of worker’s hands can raise the flag of revolution. Of course, the likes of McWilliams and the middle class rabble who think he’s some kind of intellectual will sneer at our vision. All the better for working class people to see who we’re up against.