For much of the past few years, it appeared that Ireland might finally be on the cusp of a left-led government — a historic shift in its century-long political landscape. However, the results of the general election on 29 November 2024 brought a sigh of relief to the political establishment in Dublin.
As recently as September 2023, Sinn Féin, a left-nationalist and democratic socialist party, was polling at 35 percent. Combined with the support for other left-wing parties, which hovered around 15 percent, since 2021 the left had consistently outpolled Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the two centre-right parties that have dominated Irish politics since the state’s inception. Yet, on election day, Sinn Féin received only 21 percent of the vote. As a result, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are now poised to form the next government.
As the election results came in, Pat Leahy, the political editor of the centrist Irish Times, wasted no time in declaring that ‘the choice of the Irish people is clear: they want more of the same’.1 He pointed out that in every one of the ten Western countries that had gone to the polls in 2024, the incumbent government had suffered losses. According to Leahy, Ireland was an anomaly. However, his analysis overlooks a crucial detail: Ireland's outgoing government wasn't solely comprised of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It also included the Green Party, who experienced an electoral fate worse than decimation, losing 11 of their 12 seats. When the Green Party’s decline is factored in, the total support for the government parties fell by 4.5 percent.
This pattern of left-wing parties joining coalitions with the southern Irish state’s two centre-right parties and then facing electoral punishment has been a consistent phenomenon since the first coalition government in 1948. For much of the state’s history, this has been the only path to government for the left. Excluding microstates like Liechtenstein and the Vatican City, Ireland is the only country in Europe to have never had a socialist or social-democratic government. While most European countries in the twentieth century were defined by a political divide between socialist labour movements and conservative parties, Ireland’s political landscape had more in common with the dynamics of other post-colonial societies.
It is only over the last few years that the prospect of a left-led government has been a realistic prospect. This reflects the seismic changes that have occurred in Irish politics over since the 2008-10 financial crisis. After a century of politics being dominated by two centre-right parties, the last fifteen years have seen the electoral decline of the right, and the rise of a fragmented left, with Sinn Féin as the largest left party.
Eighty years of the centre-right
Much of twentieth-century Irish politics stem from the revolutionary period of 1916–1923, when the war between the Irish Republican Army and British Crown Forces culminated in a treaty with Britain that partitioned the island and maintained Ireland’s subordination within the British imperial system. The ensuing civil war over the acceptance or rejection of the treaty would create the two dominant political poles of the new southern Irish state. On one side, Fine Gael emerged from the pro-treaty faction, advocating compromise with Britain and pursuing a development strategy reliant on preserving pre-independence economic ties, which were based on a condition of dependence and underdevelopment. On the other side, Fianna Fáil arose from the anti-Treaty faction, positioning itself as the custodian of revolutionary ambitions. Fianna Fáil championed economic independence and industrialisation, eventually becoming Ireland’s dominant political force. From its first term in government in 1932 to 2011, Fianna Fáil was the largest party in Irish politics, governing for 61 of those 79 years.
For decades, the left’s only route to power was through coalitions with either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Fine Gael, being the smaller of the two centre-right parties, depended on coalition partners to form a government. As a result, Ireland alternated between Fianna Fáil-led majority governments and Fine Gael/ Labour coalition governments. In these coalitions, Fine Gael’s right-wing politics was tempered by Labour, while Labour’s ambitions were kept in check by Fine Gael. This system created an extraordinary degree of political stability, with power cycling between two variations of centre-right governance.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael consistently secured over 80 percent of the vote, leaving little room for left-wing politics. In 1992, the Labour Party — never a real mass party like its European counterparts — achieved significant success, winning nearly 20 percent support. However, this progress stalled, and for the next two decades, the combined vote share of left-wing parties remained little over a fifth of the electorate. This dynamic only began to shift in the aftermath of the 2008–2010 financial crisis and the severe recession that followed, which destabilised Ireland’s political status quo and created new opportunities for the left to expand its influence.
Economic Crisis and the Rise of an Irish Left
Ireland was one of several countries to experience a massive property bubble in the early 2000s. When the bubble burst, Irish banks were left dangerously exposed to bad debts. Instead of holding the architects of this crisis accountable, the government opted for a bank bailout, shifting the burden onto taxpayers at a staggering cost of over €60 billion. This decision caused Ireland’s debt-to-GDP ratio to surge from just 25 percent in 2007 to 95 percent by 2010.2 Unable to raise funds on financial markets or meet its obligations, the govern- ment turned to the ‘Troika’ — a coalition of the International Monetary Fund, European Commission, and European Central Bank — for emergency assistance. The resulting bailout provided €67.5 billion, an amount strikingly similar to the bank rescue costs. For perspective, Ireland’s GDP at the time hovered around €140 billion.3
The fallout from this economic disaster was devastating. While the wealthy had reaped the most benefits during the boom years, it was ordinary people who paid the price during the crash. Youth unemployment skyrocketed from 8 percent in 2007 to 33 percent by 2012,driving another round of mass emigration.4 Between 2009 and 2015, an estimated 265,000 Irish citizens — mostly in their twenties — left the country in search of work, a shocking figure for a population of just 4.5 million.5 Public spending cuts deepened the crisis, slashing funding for social welfare, education, and healthcare.
The public backlash was quickly seen in the streets and in the ballot boxes. Between 2008 and 2018, there was a wave of social unrest. Year after year, massive demonstrations filled the streets of Dublin. Protest sizes regularly exceeded 80,000 in a city of 1.2 million — equivalent to well over half a million in Paris or London. Initially, these protests were led by trade unions, but by the mid-2010s, they were dominated by the fight against charges on domestic water use.
The 2011 general election marked an early turning point. Fianna Fáil, which had dominated Irish politics for decades, saw its support collapse from 42 percent in 2007 to just 14 percent. Combined, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s vote share dropped from 69 to 54 percent, while the left’s share rose from 23 to 33. Ireland’s proportional representation system encourages political fragmentation, and by the 2010s, the left was divided between a number of parties. Over the course of the decade Sinn Féin emerged as the largest among them.
Sinn Féin is descended from the leading party of the Irish revolutionary period of 1916-23, but its current iteration has its roots in the anti-imperialist war fought in the north of Ireland by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to end the British occupation, secure equal rights for all, and to ultimately bring about the IRA’s declared aim of a united 32-county democratic socialist republic.6 It is only in recent years that it has emerged as one of the largest parties both north and south of the border. Alongside Sinn Féin are three centre-left parties — Labour, the Social Democrats, and the Greens — as well as a Trotskyist electoral alliance comprising People Before Profit and the Socialist Party.
However, in the 2011 election it was not Sinn Fein but Labour that was the primary beneficiary of the leftward shift, nearly doubling its vote share and becoming the second-largest party for the first time since the civil war. But it quickly squandered this momentum by entering a coalition with the right-wing Fine Gael. Together, they implemented the harsh austerity measures demanded by the Troika. Labour’s support plummeted, and by the 2016 election, its vote share had fallen to one-third of its 2011 level.
Central to the collapse in their support was the huge anti-austerity movement that coalesced around opposition to the ‘water tax’. Introduced by the government as part of austerity measures, these new charges on domestic water consumption were widely seen as a prelude to water privatisation. Tens of thousands participated in the campaign to block the measure, with many engaging in direct action, such as preventing the installation of water meters. Between 2014 and 2016, several mass protests drew over 100,000 participants. The key tactic of the movement was non-payment, with two-thirds of households refusing to pay the charges. Ultimately, public resistance forced the government to abandon its plans, and water charges were quietly dropped after the 2016 election.
During the same period, Ireland’s feminist pro-choice movement gained significant momentum. In 1983, the Catholic Church had successfully pushed for a constitutional amendment (the Eighth) granting the foetus an ‘equal right to life’ as the mother, enshrining a ban on abortion in the constitution. This meant that any effort to legalise abortion would require a national referendum. In 2012, the Revolutionary Anarcha-Feminist Group convened a meeting that led to the founding of the Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC). Over the next several years, ARC spearheaded the push to repeal the eighth amendment, establishing local chapters and organising annual ‘March for Choice’ protests, which grew from 2,500 participants in 2012 to over 30,000 by 2017.
By 2018, the pro-choice movement had grown into a national force and managed to compel the government to call a referendum. In a historic victory, following a referendum campaign that mobilised thousands to knock on doors, 66 percent of voters supported repealing the eighth amendment, paving the way for abortion to be legalised in Ireland.
The decade from 2008 to 2018 transformed Ireland politically and socially. Hundreds of thousands participated in grassroots movements and achieved significant victories: the defeat of water charges and the repeal of the abortion ban. The electoral landscape also shifted dramatically, with the combined vote share of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael falling from around 70 percent before the crash to roughly 50 percent by the decade’s end. Meanwhile, a robust but fragmented left emerged, breaking decades of political stagnation and challenging the state’s traditional two-party system.
The 2020 Sinn Féin surprise
However, in the 2019 local elections, it appeared that Ireland’s left was des- tined to follow the trajectory of left-wing movements in other countries — initial gains during the recession giving way to stagnation or decline. Except the Green Party, which is the most centrist of the centre-left parties, and the rela- tively new Social Democrats, every major left-wing party saw its vote share fall in that election. Sinn Féin saw their seat count halved from the 159 seats won in 2014 to just 81 in 2019. The Trotskyist parties, People Before Profit and the Socialist Party, also suffered a particularly severe blow, going from 28 seats to just 11 between them. With the protest movements subsiding and the economy recovering, the left struggled to articulate a compelling vision for the future.
Sinn Féin’s collapse was especially striking. Winning just 9 percent of the vote in 2019 — a marginal improvement from the 8 percent it had received in the 2004 local elections —suggested that the party had failed to capitalize on fifteen years of social unrest and political upheaval. This lack of growth reflected Sinn Féin’s cautious and often ambiguous stance on key issues during the transformative 2008–2018 period.
During the anti-water charges movement, though Sinn Féin activists were prominent at the grassroots level, the party’s leadership adopted an equivocal position on the movement’s central tactic of mass non-payment. Sinn Féin TDs (members of the Dáil, the lower and main house of parliament) initially avoid- ed committing to non-payment, and even when they personally refused to pay, they declined to encourage others to follow suit. For instance, TD Dessie Ellis stated, ‘I’ve made it clear I won’t be paying them, but I’m leaving it up to others to make their own decision’. Similarly, TD Pádraig Mac Lochlainn described it as a matter of ‘personal choice’, while TD Seán Crowe refused to disclose whether he would pay the charges, fearing it might influence others.7
Sinn Féin’s hesitancy extended to the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which banned abortion. Although Sinn Féin supported repeal and many of its members were committed pro-choice activists, the party policy was limited to advocating abortion access only in cases of rape, incest, or fatal foetal abnormality. When the government proposed legislation allowing abortion up to twelve weeks of pregnancy, Sinn Féin was forced to scramble to update its stance. By the time of the 2018 referendum, the party had been thoroughly outpaced by grassroots feminist groups and more outspoken advocates of reproductive rights.
This persistent caution is puzzling, particularly given the activism and radicalism of Sinn Féin’s grassroots members. Perhaps the party’s recent ties to a campaign of armed struggle have made its leadership wary of appearing too militant. Regardless, this reluctance has often undermined Sinn Féin’s ability to lead during moments of social and political change.
However, housing proved an exception. Here, Sinn Féin demonstrated its ability to provide political leadership. Around the same time as Sinn Féin’s poor showing in the 2019 local elections, the party’s housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, published Home: Why Public Housing is the Answer, a bold critique of Ireland’s housing crisis. Ó Broin not only diagnosed the systemic failures of Ireland’s housing policy but also proposed a radical yet feasible solution: the large-scale construction of public homes. While publishing political books is common in many countries, it is rare in Ireland, particularly for a mainstream politician. Ó Broin’s book helped position Sinn Féin as a party with a clear, practical, and transformative vision for tackling the housing crisis.
Following the book’s publication, Sinn Féin adopted a more assertive tone on housing. Between the 2019 local elections and the February 2020 general election, the party campaigned heavily on its promise to build 100,000 public homes.8 This clarity and boldness resonated with voters, especially younger voters grappling with skyrocketing rents and housing insecurity.
The 2020 general election marked a stunning reversal of fortunes for Sinn Féin. The party won 24.5 percent of the vote — more than any other party — and secured 37 seats in the 160-member Dáil9 out of the 42 candidates it ran. Sinn Féin’s surge not only transformed its own electoral prospects but also buoyed the broader left. Under Ireland’s single transferable vote system, Sinn Féin’s surplus votes flowed to other left-wing candidates, helping elect representatives across the left spectrum.
What began as a dismal period for Sinn Féin in 2019 ended with the party leading a leftward shift in Irish politics. While the 2008-2018 decade of protests and street movements in Ireland may have come to an end, the left recovered as more people put their faith in Sinn Féin. Between January and March 2020, 4,200 applications to join were received by Sinn Féin, which would have increased their membership by nearly 50 percent.10 The success demonstrated that when Sinn Féin moved beyond its cautious instincts and articulated bold, transformative policies, it could galvanise significant public support by tapping into the deep discontent arising from Ireland’s unequal economic recovery.
Economic recovery, stagnant wages and nowhere to live
Since the end of Ireland’s recession, many have endured the disorienting reality of a booming economy coupled with stagnant or deteriorating living standards. Central to this paradox is the housing crisis.
By 2019, Ireland had rebounded from the dark days of the financial crash, with unemployment falling from a peak of 16 percent in 2012 to near-full employment at around 5 percent. Between 2008 and 2023, GDP per capita more than doubled, soaring from €41,757 to €96,553.11 Yet for most people, these numbers are meaningless. Average incomes have risen far less dramatically, and much of the apparent GDP growth is illusory — a statistical quirk caused by multinational corporations reporting profits in Ireland that were not actually generated there.
Following international pressure to curb tax avoidance schemes, over the last ten or year the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project pushed many multinationals to cease using off-shore tax havens and instead declare their profits within OECD countries. Ireland, with its low corporate tax rates and EU membership, became a prime beneficiary. Companies headquartered in Dublin now declare profits generated across Europe in Ireland, even though those profits are neither created in nor distributed to Irish society.
Ireland’s astronomical GDP figures do not reflect the reality on the ground. Only 22 percent of Ireland’s GDP flows to wages and salaries, while an
For much of the past few years, it appeared that Ireland might finally be on the cusp of a left-led government — a historic shift in its century-long political landscape.
extraordinary 68 percent goes to profits and other forms of capital income.12 Although the government does benefit through higher corporate tax receipts, these gains have done little to improve the situation of ordinary workers. Recognising the inadequacy of GDP as a measure of national prosperity, the Irish government itself now publishes alternative metrics such as Modified Gross National Income and Modified Domestic Demand, which suggest the economy has grown by about 60 percent since 2008.13 But even this growth far outpaces the modest wage increases most workers have experienced.
Between 2008 and 2023, average annual earnings for full-time employees rose from €44,186 to €56,402 — a nominal increase of 28%. Adjusted for inflation, however, the real increase is closer to just 8 percent over fifteen years.14 Meanwhile, housing costs have soared. From 2012 to 2023, the average house price nationwide more than doubled, rising from €155,114 to €333,259. In Dublin, the increase was from €240,333 to €477,129.15 Rents have followed a similar trajectory, with the standardised average rent in new tenancies doubling from around €800 per month in 2015 to €1,600 by late 2023.16
For Irish workers, the result is a profound squeeze. They live in an economy that appears to be booming but face stagnant real wages and crushing housing costs. The social consequences have been devastating. The percentage of 30–34-year-olds living with their parents rose by 45 percent between 2011 and 2022. 17 According to the National Youth Council of Ireland, seven in ten young people are now considering emigration,18 and between 2021 and 2024, emigration among 25-44 year olds increased by nearly 50 percent, from 38,900 to 58,100 a year.19 For those who remain, especially the most vulnerable, the housing crisis has exacted an even heavier toll.
In July 2014, 749 homeless children were living in emergency accommodation. By September 2024, that figure had exploded to 4,645 — a staggering 520 percent increase over a decade that was supposedly marked by economic recovery. These statistics expose the grim reality behind the headline figures: an economy that has enriched a few while leaving many behind.
The contradiction of poverty amidst plenty is not new. It has long been a driving force for socialist politics, which argue that society’s immense resources could be used to provide a decent life for all if not constrained by the pursuit of profit. However, for much of the past decade, the European left has struggled to chart a credible path toward transformative change In Ireland, however, Sinn Féin’s focus on the housing crisis offered a glimmer of hope. By presenting bold, practical solutions—most notably its proposal to build 100,000 public homes — the party tapped into widespread frustration and built momentum for change. Its surge in support was not surprising; it reflected the desperate need for leadership that addressed the lived realities of an unequal recovery.
After the 2020 election, Sinn Féin’s support grew steadily, until polling consistently over one-third of the vote in mid-2022. Of course, its support waxed and waned, rising when the housing crisis dominated headlines and ebbing during other news cycles. But in late 2023, this support began to collapse amid growing public concern over immigration, a narrative seized upon by an emboldened far-right movement.
The rise of the far right
The southern Irish state has historically been an outlier in Western Europe, with no significant far-right political presence since the mid-twentieth century, apart from the Catholic Church. However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided something of an incubation period for the far right. A motley coalition of conspiracy theorists, online grifters, and anti-abortion activists — bitter over the 2018 repeal of the Eighth Amendment — came together to protest lockdown measures. Though initially small, the movement gained momentum and built an active, if fringe, support base.
After the pandemic, the far right struggled to find a unifying cause until November 2022, when protests erupted in East Wall, a working-class Dublin neighbourhood, over plans to house asylum seekers in a vacant office building. This protest marked the start of a more organised anti-immigrant campaign.
Immigration to Ireland had surged, with arrivals nearly doubling from 74,100 in 2021 to 149,200 in 2024.20 Ireland’s response to the war in Ukraine was particularly significant; it granted temporary protection to over 112,000 Ukrainian refugees,21 the highest per capita intake in Western Europe.22 Simultaneously, asylum applications from non-Ukrainians spiked, rising from 2,194 in 2021 to 17,535 in 2024.23 Ireland’s already dysfunctional asylum infrastructure buckled under the pressure, and the government has struggled to secure accommodation for asylum seekers. In 2022, the government allowed for the suspension of parts of the country’s planning legislation in order to expedite the conversion of buildings into asylum housing. However, the situation has deteriorated to the point that recently many asylum seekers have been left sleeping on the streets. According to the Irish Refugee Council, 5,671 out of 6,407 asylum seekers were denied accommodation over the past year, with 3,001 still without shelter.24 As a result, alongside the ramshackle conversion of derelict buildings into asylum centres, small encampments of homeless asylum seekers have begun to emerge across the country — an entirely new phenomenon in Ireland.
The far right jumped on this humanitarian crisis, and there have been over 100 protests and around thirty arson attacks targeting asylum seeker accommodations since late 2022. Tensions reached a boiling point in November 2023, when a mentally ill, homeless Irish citizen who was born in Algeria attacked children with a knife outside a city centre school in Dublin. The horrific incident, which critically injured a five-year-old girl, was exploited by the far right, sparking an anti-immigrant riot. Throughout the first half of 2024, the far-right movement continued to grow by blaming the ongoing housing crisis on immigrants, organising local protests against asylum-seeker accommodation and spreading often fabricated scare stories about immigrants committing crimes.
At the grassroots level, Sinn Féin activists worked to counter the far right through community engagement, often facing threats, assaults, and even an arson attack. Yet at the national level, the party failed to take a decisive stand. In an apparent bid to avoid alienating voters with concerns about immigration, the party equivocated and failed to confront the bigotry and misinformation spread by the far right.
Unrealised hopes but a foundation to build on
This perceived inaction cost Sinn Féin dearly. It plummeted in the polls from 35 percent in September 2023 to just 18 percent a year later. The June 2024 local elections were especially disastrous, with the party receiving only 12 percent of the vote on a vague campaign slogan, ‘Change Starts Here’. The far right also performed poorly, securing only around five council seats out of 949. However, Sinn Féin’s sharp decline shattered earlier hopes for a left-led government. By the time of the November 2024 general election, Sinn Féin’s support rebounded to 21 percent — what the party’s campaign director Matt Carthy framed as a ‘phenomenal result’ compared to the lows of the local election.25 But at the time of the June local elections, around 20-22 percent of people were indicating that they were planning on voting Sinn Féin in the general election. This suggests that some Sinn Féin voters either didn’t bother to vote or voted for someone else in the local elections, and that there was little recovery in Sinn Féin’s support after its ten-point drop in the first half of 2024.
While Sinn Féin’s decline dominated headlines, the broader left experienced mixed results in November’s general election. Labour and the Social Democrats nearly doubled their seats, each increasing from six to eleven, though the Soc Dems faced immediate turmoil with the suspension of a newly elected TD.26 The Trotskyist parties saw a modest rise in vote share, but their number of seats declined from five to two. Meanwhile, the Green Party, who had just spent five years supporting the outgoing right-wing government, lost all but one of their twelve seats.
Despite these setbacks, the election marked the second-best performance for Ireland’s left since the state’s founding, though far short of the transformative breakthrough once anticipated. The conservative Fianna Fáil–Fine Gael alliance was left to form another government, perpetuating the status quo.
The 2024 election underscored the challenges of navigating a political landscape shaped by economic inequality, housing crises, and a rising far right. Sinn Féin’s failure to capitalize on earlier momentum serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of clear leadership in moments of crisis. Yet the fact that the left is still in a relatively strong position shows that a foundation for advancing socialist politics remains — albeit one that will require rebuilding, unity, and a renewed focus on addressing the lived realities of ordinary people.
Endnotes
1 Pat Leahy, ‘The choice of the Irish people is clear: they want more of the same’, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ politics/2024/12/01/the-choice-of-the-irish-people-is-clear- more-of-the-same/.
2 John FitzGerald and Ide Kearney, ‘Irish Government Debt and Implied Debt Dynamics: 2011–2015’, Quarterly Economic Com- mentary (Autumn 2011).
3 Central Statistics Office, Expenditure on Gross and Net National Income at Current Market Prices, Annual National Accounts, https://data.cso.ie/table/NA007.
4 Central Statistics Office, ILO Participation, Employment and Unemployment Characteristics, Labour Force Survey Quarterly Series, https://data.cso.ie/table/QLF18.
5 Irial Glynn, Tomás Kelly, and Piaras Mac Einrí, ‘The Re-Emergence of Emigration from Ireland: New Trends in An Old Story’, Migration Policy Institute, 2015, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/ default/files/publications/TCM-Emigration-Ireland-FINAL.pdf.
6 Ireland was partitioned by the 1921 treaty into a 26-county state in the south and a six-county state in the north.
7 Órla Ryan, ‘These TDs and Senators are refusing to pay water charges. Here's why...’, The Journal, https://www.thejournal. ie/which-tds-are-not-paying-their-water-charges-2-1755481- Nov2014.
8 Sinn Féin, Giving workers & families a break: A Manifesto for Change, Sinn Féin General Election Manifesto 2020, https://www. sinnfein.ie/files/2020/Giving_Workers_and_Families_a_Break_-
9 The number of seats in the Dáil increased from 160 to 174 for the 2024 election.
10 Colm Keena, ‘Sinn Féin is the richest political party in Ireland’, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/sinn- fein-is-the-richest-political-party-in-ireland-1.4193124.
11 Central Statistics Office, Modified Gross National Income at Cur- rent Market Prices, Annual National Accounts, https://data.cso. ie/table/NA001; Central Statistics Office, Population Estimates (Persons in April), Annual Population Estimates, https://data.cso. ie/table/PEA01.
12 Eurostat, ‘Annual national accounts - evolution of the income components of GDP’, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statis- tics-explained/index.php?title=Annual_national_accounts_-_ evolution_of_the_income_components_of_GDP.
13 Central Statistics Office, Modified Gross National Income at Current Market Prices, Annual National Accounts, https://data. cso.ie/table/NA001; Central Statistics Office, Modified Total Domestic Demand and Components of Modified Gross Domestic Fixed Capital Formation, Annual National Accounts, https://data. cso.ie/table/NAQ05.
14 Central Statistics Office, Average Annual Earnings and Other Labour Costs, Earnings Hours and Employment Costs Survey – Annual, https://data.cso.ie/table/EHA05.
15 Central Statistics Office, Residential Dwelling Property Transac- tions, https://data.cso.ie/table/HPA02.
16 Residential Tenancies Board, Rent Index Q3 2023, www.rtb.ie/ images/uploads/forms/RTB_Rent_Index_Q3_2023_Report.pdf.
17 Central Statistics Office, Population aged 18 years and over living with their parents, Census 2022, https://data.cso.ie/table/F3052.
18 National Youth Council of Ireland, ‘Young People Consid- ering Emigrating for Better Life’, https://www.youth.ie/ articles/young-people-considering-emigration-for-better-quali- ty-of-life-than-in-ireland/
19 Central Statistics Office, Estimated Migration (Persons in April), Annual Population Estimates, https://data.cso.ie/table/PEA03.
20 Central Statistics Office, Annual Population Change, Annual Population Estimates, https://data.cso.ie/table/PEA15.
21 Central Statistics Office, ‘Arrivals from Ukraine in Ireland Series 14’, https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/fp/p-aui/ arrivalsfromukraineinirelandseries14.
22 Lynne Kelleher, ‘Ireland has taken in more Ukrainian refugees per head of population than the UK and major EU nations’, Irish Independent, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/ireland- has-taken-in-more-ukrainian-refugees-per-head-of-popula- tion-than-the-uk-and-major-eu-nations/a1923617549.html.
23 These figures are for the first eleven months of the year only. In- ternational Protection Office, Monthly statistical report November 2021, https://www.ipo.gov.ie/en/IPO/IPO%20Monthly%20Web- site%20Stats%20November%202021%20FINAL.pdf/Files/IPO%20 Monthly%20Website%20Stats%20November%202021%20FINAL. pdf; International Protection Office, Monthly statistical report November 2021, https://www.ipo.gov.ie/en/IPO/20241210%20 IPO%20Monthly%20Website%20Stats%20Nov%202024%20 FINAL.pdf/Files/20241210%20IPO%20Monthly%20Website%20 Stats%20Nov%202024%20FINAL.pdf.
24 Irish Refugee Council, ‘Irish Refugee Council calls for urgent action as number of unaccommodated protection applicants tops a record 3,000 on the one year anniversary of no accommodation policy’, https://www.irishrefugeecouncil.ie/unaccommodated- protection-applicants-top-a-record-3000.
25 Raidió Teilifís Éireann, ‘Matt Carthy reacts to Exit Poll findings’, https://www.rte.ie/video/id/21522/.
26 It transpired that, through his ownership of shares in a company that supplies artificial intelligence tools to the Israel Defence Forces, the new Social Democrats TD had profited from the geno- cide in Israel. He also appears to have lied about this to his party.