Open for Business

In March 2026, Ireland's Housing Minister James Browne stood in a pavilion on the French Riviera and told an audience of international property investors that Ireland is "open for business." The pavilion at MIPIM — the annual property industry conference in Cannes — was sponsored by Cairn Homes, Glenveagh Properties, and Evara. IRES REIT, Kennedy Wilson, Ballymore, and IPUT were exhibiting. Over 21 state staff attended.

Back in Ireland, 17,112 people were sleeping in emergency accommodation. Among them were 5,319 children.

The Housing Minister described homelessness as "our most pressing challenge." He said it from the French Riviera, surrounded by the institutional investors his government had spent a decade inviting into the Irish housing market.

This is not irony. This is policy.

The longest pattern in Irish history

Landlordism never left Ireland. It changed its accent.

In the nineteenth century, absentee English landlords extracted rent from Irish tenants who had no security of tenure, no right to improvements, and no political representation. When the tenants couldn't pay, they were evicted. Between 1849 and 1854, at least 250,000 people were formally evicted during the Famine clearances — entire townlands emptied so the land could be consolidated into more profitable holdings.

The Land War of the 1870s–80s and the subsequent Land Acts were supposed to end this. Tenant purchase schemes transferred ownership. The Free State and then the Republic built social housing at scale — peaking at nearly 9,000 local authority houses in a single year in the mid-1970s. For a few decades, it looked like Ireland had broken the pattern.

It hadn't. It had merely paused it.

What happened from the mid-1990s onwards was a systematic reconstruction of the landlord class — not through inheritance or colonialism, but through tax policy, deregulation, and the deliberate withdrawal of the state from housing provision. The new landlords wear suits, operate through SPVs registered in Luxembourg, and call themselves "institutional investors." The effect on the tenant is the same: insecurity, extraction, and the ever-present threat of eviction.

The researchers McLoughlin and McMahon, writing for RTÉ Brainstorm in February 2026, calculated that modern eviction rates in Ireland — approximately 1 notice per 100 households in 2023–2024 — have not been seen since the 1850s.

One hundred and seventy years. Full circle.

Act I: Building the bubble (1997–2007)

The housing crisis did not begin with the crash. It began with the boom.

Charlie McCreevy, Fianna Fáil's Minister for Finance from 1997 to 2004, cut Capital Gains Tax from 40% to 20%. He extended Section 23 tax relief — which allowed property investors to write off the full cost of construction against rental income — to the Upper Shannon region, against the advice of his own Department. He cut stamp duty for investors buying new properties. Every signal said the same thing: property is not shelter, it is a tax-efficient investment vehicle.

McCreevy's policies turned housing into a speculative commodity. Between 1997 and 2007, Irish house prices tripled. Banks competed to offer 100% mortgages. Anglo Irish Bank, under Sean FitzPatrick, pioneered aggressive development lending that made the bank a systemic risk to the entire economy.

Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach throughout the boom, insisted the market would deliver a "soft landing." In July 2007 — months before the crash — he told the ICTU conference: "Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don't know how people who engage in that don't commit suicide." He apologised for the phrasing. He did not change the policy.

The Galway Tent became the symbol of the era: an annual Fianna Fáil fundraiser at the Galway Races where developers paid up to €400 a head to mingle with the Taoiseach and his ministers. The Mahon Tribunal later found systemic corruption in the planning system, with lobbyist Frank Dunlop testifying about cash payments to councillors in pubs and car parks in exchange for rezoning votes. In one case, 17 acres in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown were rezoned from agricultural to industrial by a 13–11 vote — increasing the land value from €8 million to €61 million.

The tribunal found that Ahern himself did not truthfully account for IR£165,000 in payments to accounts connected to him, rejecting much of his sworn evidence as "untrue." He resigned from Fianna Fáil in 2012 after the report was published. He rejoined in 2023.

Brian Cowen succeeded McCreevy as Finance Minister in 2004 and became Taoiseach in May 2008, just in time for the collapse. On the night of 29 September 2008, his cabinet guaranteed all six Irish banks — a decision that ultimately cost the state tens of billions. Ireland entered an EU-IMF bailout. Cowen's approval rating fell to 8%. He did not contest the 2011 election. In 2019, he suffered a severe brain haemorrhage and has lived quietly since, physically impaired but mentally sharp. He serves on the board of the Simon Community, a homelessness charity.

The boom left Ireland with ghost estates, broken banks, and a generation in negative equity. But the crisis it created was not the housing crisis we have now. That required a second act.

Act II: Selling the wreckage (2011–2019)

The crash should have been the reset. It wasn't. It was the setup.

In 2011, the Fine Gael–Labour coalition took office promising to address the housing emergency. They created NAMA — the National Asset Management Agency — which took over €30 billion in distressed property loans from the banks. NAMA now controlled land with capacity for over 86,000 homes.

What happened to that land tells you everything about Irish housing policy.

NAMA's mandate was to maximise commercial returns for the taxpayer. Not to build housing. Not to address the social housing waiting list. To get the best price. So NAMA sold — overwhelmingly to international vulture funds and institutional investors who bought Irish property debt at a discount and waited for values to recover.

By 2022, NAMA had disposed of 5,478 hectares. Fewer than 11,000 homes had been built on it. Over 80% of the land remained undeveloped — warehoused by investors while the housing list grew.

Simultaneously, Michael Noonan (Fine Gael), as Minister for Finance, introduced the REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) regime in the Finance Act 2013. Irish REITs pay zero corporation tax on rental income and zero capital gains tax on property sales. The stated purpose was to attract investment to the post-crash property market. The actual effect was to create a tax-privileged class of institutional landlord with every incentive to acquire and hold residential property and no incentive to sell it to owner-occupiers.

The cuckoo funds followed. By 2019, according to the Construction Industry Federation, 95% of new apartments in Ireland were being sold to institutional investors. Individual buyers were being outbid for homes in their own neighbourhoods by entities registered in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, operating through structures designed to minimise Irish tax.

The state did not merely permit this. It incentivised it. It designed the tax code to make it happen.

Act III: The ministers who watched (2016–2026)

Ireland has had four Housing Ministers in ten years. Each inherited a crisis from their predecessor. None resolved it. The pattern of ministerial musical chairs itself tells the story: housing is treated as a political problem to be managed, not a structural failure to be fixed.

Simon Coveney (Fine Gael, 2016–2017)

Launched Rebuilding Ireland in July 2016. Under this plan, councils built a total of 7,449 new social houses — fewer than they had built in the single year of 1975. Coveney moved to Foreign Affairs within a year. He did not contest the 2024 election. He is now a consultant with EY Ireland's geopolitical strategy team.

Eoghan Murphy (Fine Gael, 2017–2020)

Presided over homelessness rising past 10,000 for the first time. Defended co-living developments — 16-square-metre rooms with shared kitchens — by comparing them to "very trendy boutique hotels." Survived a vote of no confidence. Has since said he wanted to resign when homelessness hit 10,000. He resigned his Dáil seat in 2021 and moved to London, where he works in international election observation for the OSCE. His memoir, Running From Office, described the sleeping pills and anxiety of the role.

Darragh O'Brien (Fianna Fáil, 2020–2025)

Launched Housing for All in September 2021, targeting 300,000 new homes by 2030. When in opposition, he had mocked Murphy's co-living policy: "If Leo Varadkar and Eoghan Murphy want this bonkers policy so much, they should co-live together." In government, he delivered 9,089 social housing new builds in his final year — a recent record, but consistently below his own targets. He halved Part V requirements from 20% to 10% under the 2015 Act (as part of the Fine Gael government he joined in coalition), then restored them to 20% in 2021. The years of reduced obligation — 2015 to 2021 — coincided with some of the highest construction activity of the recovery, meaning thousands of social and affordable units were permanently lost. He is now Minister for Transport and Climate.

James Browne (Fianna Fáil, 2025–present)

In his first year, homelessness rose 10.6%. He led Ireland's first full delegation to MIPIM. He stood on the French Riviera and said: "The only policy I have is to solve the housing crisis and get people into the homes that they need as quickly as possible."

The eviction machine

In Q3 2025, 5,405 tenancy termination notices were issued in Ireland — a 35% increase year-on-year. Sixty-one percent cited the landlord's intention to sell. Across 2023, a total of 19,011 notices were served.

The institutional landlords are the most systematic operators.

LRC Group, through its Cyprus-registered subsidiary Xerico Ltd, owns 2,036 Irish rental properties. Between October 2022 and April 2024, LRC subsidiaries served at least 100 Notices of Termination — overwhelmingly timed to end tenancies before the six-year mark that would trigger tenancies of unlimited duration. In Killarney, in October 2025, 14 households — 34 people including 15 children — were told to leave by July 2026. In Stillorgan, LRC evicted tenants from the Whately Place estate, left homes empty, then re-let them at rents nearly 70% higher.

IRES REIT, the state's largest private institutional landlord with almost 4,000 homes, issued notices to quit to 5% of its tenants in 2023 and is planning to sell 315 apartments over three to five years as part of a "capital recycling programme." It returned to profit in 2025 — €49.7 million.

This is not a market failure. This is the market working exactly as designed: extracting maximum rent, cycling out long-term tenants to reset prices upward, and converting homes into financial instruments.

The Community Action Tenants Union told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing in December 2025 that eviction notices from corporate landlords had increased significantly. The Tyrrelstown amendment of 2016 — introduced after Goldman Sachs subsidiary Beltany Property Finance tried to evict 200 families from a Dublin estate — was supposed to prevent mass evictions by large landlords. It has been systematically circumvented through staggered notices and corporate restructuring.

The ghost homes: short-term lets

While 17,000 people sleep in emergency accommodation, over 20,000 entire homes and apartments are listed on Airbnb and other short-term letting platforms across Ireland. On any given night, there are more homes available to tourists than to Irish renters.

Threshold, the national housing charity, reported in March 2026 that short-term lets outnumber homes available for long-term rent by 4.1 to 1 nationwide. In some areas, the ratio reaches 9 to 1.

The government's response — a registration system for short-term lets — will not launch until 20 May 2026. Planning permission for short-term lets has technically been required for years. Enforcement has been negligible.

Meanwhile, the rental market has hollowed out. Fewer than 2,300 homes were advertised for long-term private rent on Daft.ie nationwide at the end of 2025. Average rents reached €2,086 per month — up 4.4% in 2025, up 80% over the past decade.

The numbers that should end careers

The trajectory of Irish homelessness is not a gradual worsening. It is an exponential curve.

Since 2014, homelessness in Ireland has more than quadrupled. Between July 2021 — the pandemic-era low — and January 2026, it more than doubled.

And these are only the people in state-funded emergency accommodation during a single count week each month. They exclude rough sleepers, people in domestic violence refuges, people in Direct Provision, people couch-surfing, and the vast hidden homeless population in overcrowded or unsuitable housing. The real number is significantly higher.

The only period of sustained decline was during COVID, when the government imposed an eviction ban. The moment that ban lifted, the numbers resumed their steep climb. The policy implication is obvious and has been studiously ignored: when you stop evicting people, fewer people become homeless.

Among the 17,112 are 5,319 children in 2,555 families. The number of families in homeless services has increased by 6,500% since June 2014. These are not transient rough sleepers. They are working families priced out of a market that was engineered to exclude them.

The red carpet at Cannes

In March 2026, the government rolled out the red carpet at MIPIM not despite the crisis, but because of the policy choices that created it. The institutional investors in that room are there because the state invited them, incentivised them, and continues to design legislation around their needs.

The Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act 2025, which took effect on 1 March 2026, extends rent controls nationwide — but carves out a critical exemption: new-build apartments with a commencement notice after 9 June 2025 are exempt from the 2% rent cap. Their rents are capped only at CPI. For institutional investors building apartment blocks, this is a green light to set initial rents at market rates and increase them at inflation — a far more favourable regime than the one governing existing housing stock.

Budget 2026 reduced VAT on new apartments from 13.5% to 9% until 2030 and introduced an enhanced 125% corporation tax deduction for apartment construction costs. Cost-rental income was exempted from corporation tax entirely.

At MIPIM, the CEO of Cairn Homes said the policy changes of the past 18 months are "changing sentiment towards investment opportunities in Ireland." The CEO of Glenveagh said investors at the event told him "Ireland is now a more competitive investment location for property projects than other countries in Europe." The CEO of IRES REIT said: "What we're seeing is an awful lot of conversations starting to happen that hadn't happened in the past."

The investor class heard the Housing Minister say "open for business" and understood exactly what he meant.

Cairn Homes reported revenue of €944.6 million and profit after tax of €132.7 million in 2025. Glenveagh reported record revenue of €926 million and pre-tax profit of €125 million. These are not companies struggling with viability. These are companies thriving within a system designed around their interests.

The Kenny Report: fifty-three years on a shelf

In 1973, Justice John Kenny chaired a committee that recommended local authorities be given the power to compulsorily purchase undeveloped land at existing use value plus 25%. The Kenny Report would have broken the speculative cycle at its source — preventing the windfall profits that flow from rezoning agricultural land for housing.

It was never implemented. The stated reason was constitutional concerns. No government ever tested those concerns in court.

The Mahon Tribunal later revealed why: the rezoning process was the single most lucrative nexus of political corruption in the state. Councillors were being paid cash in car parks to vote for rezoning that multiplied land values by factors of seven or eight. The Kenny Report would have eliminated the profit motive for corruption. It was shelved because the corruption was the point.

Fifty-three years later, Ireland introduced the Residential Zoned Land Tax — 3% annually on zoned, serviced land that is not being developed. It is a gesture toward the same principle the Kenny Report articulated, diluted beyond recognition. County Westmeath alone has approximately 260 hectares of undeveloped residential zoned land with capacity for approximately 12,150 units sitting idle.

The social housing collapse

The withdrawal of the state from direct housing provision is the single most consequential policy decision of the past three decades. It was not an accident. It was a choice, made repeatedly, by identifiable governments.

At peak, in the mid-1970s, local authorities built nearly 9,000 houses per year. By 2014, the figure had collapsed to approximately 285 — a 97% decline. The capital allocation for social housing was cut from €1.5 billion in 2008 to €485 million in 2011.

In its place came HAP — the Housing Assistance Payment — which pays private landlords to house people on the social housing waiting list. The state now spends over €525 million annually on HAP, supporting approximately 58,000 households. Critics describe it as a subsidy to private landlords using public money, locking tenants into an insecure private rental market while the social housing list remains at 58,824 households, with average wait times of 7 to 11 years.

The shift to Approved Housing Bodies further removed social housing from direct state delivery. The four largest AHBs now control over 54,000 homes with approximately €7 billion in assets. Their combined debt has exploded — Respond's from €292 million to almost €1.4 billion between 2017 and 2022; Tuath's from €243 million to €1.77 billion. More than half of the AHBs assessed by the regulator in 2024 were found non-compliant.

Meanwhile, the demand for affordable housing tells its own story. In March 2026, 1,300 applications were received for 56 cost-rental homes in Dublin — a ratio of 23 to 1. In December 2024, 4,600 applications for 195 apartments. The government's Housing for All strategy targets 18,000 cost-rental homes by 2030. By early 2025, just over 2,100 had been delivered.

Where are they now?

The politicians who built this crisis have not been held accountable. They have been promoted, pensioned, or repositioned.

Bertie Ahern — the Taoiseach who presided over the bubble, whose tribunal evidence was rejected as "untrue" — rejoined Fianna Fáil in 2023 and has been coy about a presidential run.

Charlie McCreevy — the Finance Minister whose tax policies fuelled the speculation — served as EU Commissioner until 2010 and is now largely retired.

Brian Cowen — the Taoiseach who guaranteed the banks — suffered a stroke in 2019 and lives quietly, serving on the board of the Simon Community.

Simon Coveney — who launched Rebuilding Ireland and delivered fewer social homes than a single year in the 1970s — is now a geopolitical strategy consultant at EY.

Eoghan Murphy — who compared co-living to boutique hotels while homelessness topped 10,000 — lives in London, observing elections for the OSCE.

Darragh O'Brien — who mocked his predecessor's housing policy then delivered consistently below his own targets — is now Minister for Transport and Climate.

The Housing Ministry itself has become a political revolving door: a portfolio so toxic that no minister stays long enough to be held responsible for outcomes. Four ministers in ten years. Each one launches a strategy, names a target, claims progress, and moves on before the numbers prove them wrong.

The Department of Finance knows

In November 2025, the Department of Finance predicted that Ireland's housing crisis will last another fifteen years.

This is not a forecast of failure. It is a statement of acceptance. The department responsible for the tax incentives that created the REIT regime, the Help to Buy scheme that inflated prices (cost: €206 million against an estimate of €50 million), the shared equity scheme that critics call "a pro-developer scam," and the MIPIM pavilion that invited international capital to profit from the shortage — that department has concluded that the crisis will persist until 2040.

Fifteen more years of 17,000 people in emergency accommodation. Fifteen more years of children growing up in hotels. Fifteen more years of €2,086 average rents. Fifteen more years of institutional investors reporting record profits while the housing list grows.

This is not a housing crisis. It is a housing policy. The crisis is the point. The scarcity is the product. The profit requires the shortage to continue.

The historical rhyme

In the nineteenth century, Irish tenants paid rent to absentee landlords who extracted wealth from Irish land without obligation to the people who lived on it. The tenants had no security. The landlords had no accountability. The state enforced the landlord's property rights and called it the rule of law.

In 2026, Irish tenants pay rent to institutional investors registered in Cyprus, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, who extract wealth from Irish housing without obligation to the communities they operate in. The tenants face eviction rates not seen since the 1850s. The landlords report record profits. The state designs tax policy around their needs and calls it solving the housing crisis.

The accents have changed. The addresses have changed. The scale of the extraction has changed.

The structure has not.

Ireland did not end landlordism. It privatised it, tax-optimised it, and rebranded it as "institutional investment in residential assets." The Minister for Housing went to Cannes to sell it. The Department of Finance has forecast fifteen more years of it.

And 5,319 children slept in emergency accommodation last night.

Open for business.