The lights are off & nobody's home when it comes to our housing policy

Crisis proves Govt's common sense was evicted years ago

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WHEN it comes to Ireland's official policy on addressing the housing crisis, it is more than a play on words to suggest there seems to be nobody at home.

Common sense was long ago evicted and left shivering on the side of the road. Innovative thinking is a concept as rundown as any of the forlorn, boarded-up eyesores which blight every city and town.

Ambition, compassion and intelligent planning have left the building and are sleeping rough in some doorway on a mattress of cardboard.

Even as home ownership for twenty and thirtysomethings is reduced to an idea slipping forever from view, their choices in life distilled down to their parents' boxroom or a one-way ticket to Oz, some authentically extraordinary and damning figures from the 2022 census re-announce themselves as Exhibit A in the grim, unseemly story of national inertia.

The Galactico of 21st century scandals.

On the night of that audit three years ago, there were 163,433 properties sitting vacant across 26 counties. Almost 50,000 of those had been unoccupied since 2016, more than 23,000 since 2011.

Let's frame that another way. In the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis, there are substantially more empty structures in Ireland than the combined population of the cities of Galway (85,910) and Waterford (60,079).

WASTE

The irresistible temptation is to summon Gay Byrne's old catch phrase to offer a further idea of the scale of this insanity.

Unthinkably, there is one of these monuments of waste for everybody who was in the audience at the recent All-Ireland finals in both hurling and football.

That this can be the case as the societal catastrophe of homelessness spreads across the land like an insatiable cancer feels like the last word in lunacy.