Kelly Earley

SOME OF THE biggest stories in last week’s news cycle reflected the looming crises we’re facing in Ireland.

Nursing Homes Ireland (NHI) raised the alarm about our ageing population, flagging that by 2045, the number of people aged 85 and over will rise by 162%. Pleading for support from the government, NHI noted that nursing homes are presently at 95% capacity.

With nursing homes “effectively full” according to NHI chief executive Tadhg Daly, repercussions will be felt in the not-so-distant future. According to the Department of Health, there will be a million people over the age of 65 in Ireland by the end of this decade.

The NHI CEO noted that “Ageing is not a crisis; it is one of Ireland’s greatest achievements.” While this is absolutely true, the entire nation’s ability to reap the spoils of those achievements in decades to come has now been brought into question.

Separately, we have run into major issues with staffing Dublin’s Metrolink construction. Late last week, the National Transport Authority revealed that 8,000 people will be required to come onboard to build the 19-kilometre rail system.

The National Transport Authority’s CEO, Anne Shaw, flagged that among the 8,000 people needed across the lifespan of the project, the government will need bricklayers, heavy machine operators and tunnellers. To chip away at just some of the accommodations needed to facilitate this, new purpose-built housing is coming down the tracks for 2,000 of these prospective workers.

An imminent exodus

Coinciding with these recent stories, the National Youth Council of Ireland’s (NYCI) latest research revealed that 68% of 18-24 year olds are considering moving abroad, with 71% believing life would be better elsewhere.

Among the main concerns of young people were housing, securing well-paid work, the adverse impact that life here has on mental health and the cost of transport. Great time to raise transport fares, huh?

With the results of this survey, NYCI has called on the government to abolish sub-minimum rates of pay for under 20s in Ireland, while expanding free public transport to under 25s, with the goal of relieving some of the pressure that’s sending our young population packing.

Irish people abroad are taking up posts across all industries. People are leaving the country for nursing, tech, construction, teaching and every other imaginable profession – sometimes, regardless of whether they have a background in it or not.

There are people who’ve never set foot on a building site travelling to Australia for Fly-in, Fly-out (FIFO) roles in mines. One of my best friends, whose background is in corporate communications, is currently in Australia shovelling horse shite. And she still has a reasonably better quality of life there than she did on a decent salary, with relatively low rent in Dublin.

Sometimes it’s not even the money or the housing that sends people onto a plane out of Ireland, but the pursuit of some semblance of hope. Few young people are finding it at home right now.

The answer is right in front of us

In decades to come, when these compounding issues leave us reeling, we’ll be reaping what the current government has sown. Years of inaction on housing have driven Irish people into emergency accommodation, onto the streets and packing their lives up to move to other countries.

This isn’t just a failure to build housing, but to adequately regulate the long and short-term rental markets, and to take meaningful steps to address the massive issues of vacancy and dereliction. This year, the Central Statistics Office estimated that just over 70,000 properties in Ireland lay vacant. In 2022, rental properties accounted for one in five (33,653) vacant properties in the census.

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Tensions regarding resourcing and housing scarcity have caused severe discord within communities, with migrants and people of colour bearing the brunt of this. There’s no way to reconcile the idea “Ireland is full” with the fact that we’re in desperate need of thousands of workers, for crucial sectors like infrastructure and healthcare.

In the case of the Metrolink development, officials working on the project even stated that they’ve been travelling around Europe to recruit potential workers, as we’re unable to meet the demand with our current population. The fact that this is even necessary reflects multiple failures in housing, investment in young people and our management of migration.

Our prioritisation of the private rental market over social and public housing has already come back to bite us in a big way. What’s most unfortunate is that it could be decades before we start to wonder if Ireland shot itself in the foot by making policy changes to accommodate populist, racist rhetoric regarding immigration. 

Even in recent weeks, we’ve seen citizenship rules tightened, making life more challenging for people who hope to lay down roots in Ireland in the long term. These are people who are already making significant contributions through employment, taxes and their roles in their communities.

Whatever way you look at it, a country with an ageing population can’t afford to take a harsh stance against immigration. Ireland’s entire future rests upon our capacity for inclusion.