Immigration to Ireland - policies, challenges, and solutions *Read OP before posting*

This isnt true.

The councils are building very few social homes, subcontracted or otherwise.

As an example, in 2022, Dun Laoghaire Council built just 2 social homes.

That borough has a larger population than Cork City.

What the councils are doing is taking the 10% or 20% part 5 social housing that is funded by the developer on new build estates and are then renting or buying additional housing stock on the same developments, using tax payers money. Ensuring rents stay high for everyone else, as the private sector stock is being reallocated to social.

Its a terrible policy and very short sighted, because in a lot of these cases, the council is only renting the additional stock, not buying it.

Which means these homes are not social homes at all. They are leased to the social on a short term basis and at a crazy cost to the tax payer.

As Megaman says, the councils need to start delivering and owning their own social schemes and leave the private sector alone.

That way we will start to see rent/house prices decline in the private sector, as more supply hits the private sector market.

They're building tiny pockets of social housing, not anything like enough. How many thousands are homeless and in the council housing list?

What was the issues that caused the housing crisis in the decades from independence to the 1970s?

And what happened to relieve those issues?

If you dont figure on building less homes, you need to keep the investors sweet then because they are the ones funding the new developments!

Your points contradict each other.

You say you want rid of investors who are funding new homes, but at the same time you expect the number of new homes to magically stay the same, or even increase, when nobody is financing them. Lol.

I am hoping you are still at school and haven't studied economics yet.

As has been pointed out to you numerous times, we need migrants to provide services and economic growth and to retain our exceptional private sector employment.

Meta, Google, Apple etc would not be here if it were not for our ability to atrract foreign labour from Europe, The US, APAC etc.

There is zero chance that caps will be introduced on people moving to the country, so its a waste of oxygen proposing it.

I'd kind see that as a bit of a red herring also, given that the emigration has been far more gradual. If the housing shortage was being caused because by the factors you mention it'd be relevant, but really it's a bit like Holly Cairns statement. It sounds good, but it's really irrelevant.

I don't know with some of ye, ye just don't accept that there is a lot of immigration and that it's very hard to provide housing for immigrants when you've no idea how many will come. If ye know how to do it ye definitely should be in government.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here but the contention being made by the other poster is that population growth caused by immigration makes it impossible for the government to formulate housing policy because they cannot assess the population-based needs. It's therefore fair to point to the fact that this is disregarding the 1m+ people born in Ireland who now live abroad — and current supply of housing would not cater for them even if you swapped out the foreign-born population for them. So blaming immigration for being the cause of the "inability" to plan, and therefore as the root cause of the housing crisis, is selective.

Demand might be exacerbating the problem but has in no way caused it. As you say yourself, government inaction is the prime cause. Also, the vast bulk of new housing is usually bought by Irish citizens - immigrants invariably choose to rent, many because they have the intention of returning home at some point in future (it's more of an Irish cultural thing to own your own home).

Irrelevant? So emigration is irrelevant because it's been "more gradual", which I take it to mean then that you see immigration as more sudden — and we are talking about a housing crisis that has been a feature for a decade now in a context where 11,000 homes were built in 2014 causing years of backlog. But immigration, being more sudden, is the cause of this very sudden crisis that's been going on for ten years.

Like I just don't get the argument here. Reduce immigration so the shortage of housing doesn't look like a shortage anymore because there are less immigrants thus less demand even though the I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-A-Shortage still wouldn't cater for the population actually born in Ireland?

The problem with this argument is that its a ham-fisted attempt to shoehorn immigration into a more prominent place on the list of causes than it ought to be — and clumsily disregards the factual inconsistencies that this line of argument creates. By all means, yes, it's perfectly fine to say immigration has an effect on demand — but what we have in Ireland is a demonstrable longstanding lack of supply.

Your dream of Council workers building homes like they did 40 years ago isn't going to come to back.

Infact, the council buying up houses from housing stock (stock that is built privately) is just more interference into the creation of a housing market.

The demand, coming from a massive influx of non eu people, is something like the Low Hanging Fruit that the government can indeed, control.

I'd say there's probably scope for some control, especially around visas.

After that I'm not so sure.

What other countries controlled immigration? What did they do and what did it cost? How effective was it?

You know the stuff usually looked at when considering a change of policy.

You don’t seem to realise what has happened regarding house completions since 2008,

10,200 social and affordable houses is not going to make up for all those houses that should of been built in the last decade.