Ireland Is Full

You are reading that right. A few weeks ago, in a country of nearly 5 million people, there were only 716 available rental vacancies. Ireland’s housing shortage is extremely acute. Students at Trinity College began demanding the reinstitution of online instruction because of the lack of accommodations in Dublin. Part of the problem is that the Irish have accepted more than twice as many Ukrainian refugees as France. (France is ten times larger than Ireland by population.) But that’s only a small part of the problem.

After Ireland’s spectacular housing crash over a decade ago, the building industry was extremely slow to reconstitute itself. Since then, Ireland has also been bedeviled by shoddy building practices. A lack of regulatory checks on concrete blocks means that a decade or more of buildings repaired, expanded, or built in the northwest of Ireland are falling apart and threaten to collapse on their occupants. The scandal is going to cost the government billions and will soak up resources that are desperately needed to build more new housing.

And now, land with permission to build is so rare that the home-building firms are starting to become more like land-value-speculation firms. That is, their specialty is acquiring expensive land and selling it when it becomes more expensive. The home built to make the sale is more of an afterthought. These firms restrict supply into down markets. Every turn of the housing market in Ireland works like a ratchet, pushing prices of land upward, squeezing the quality of the material in the construction, and driving the percentage of income Irish people must devote to their mortgage ever upward. The government’s only response is the one you would expect: subsidies for first time buyers, which are immediately priced into the market and recouped by owners as profits.

Then today comes the headline: “State may need to limit home-building to just 21,000 units a year to meet climate targets.” Of course! After spending several centuries trying to outdo others by making Catholicism, Victorian social amelioration, and economic reform more miserable and punitive than they had to be, the Irish are now turning climate policy into a form of self-abnegation. Ireland, which has only recently become a destination for inward migration of non-Irish people, still produces nearly 60,000 children a year. Limiting new homes built to 21,000 units a year is a recipe for disaster. Absent tremendous political rupture, the world should prepare for a new wave of Irish emigration.