Mayo comment: Shameful threshold reached in battle against rising evictions and homelessness
The fact that 7,000 Irish households have been evicted in the first quarter of this year is a startling statistic.
The word eviction is a very morbid one in the Irish psyche, dating back to the awful Famine Years from 1846 and 1852 when unscrupulous landlords threw 100,000 families out of their homes and onto the streets.
This equated to between 15,000 to 16,000 households a year, less than the 20,000 households who suffered the indignity of eviction in 2025.
As Social Democrats TD Rory Hearn pointed out during the May 19 Oireachtas debate on rents hikes and evictions, not only are we at the highest rate of evictions since the Famine, we have surpassed it.
Frightening, really.
And no matter how one interprets such a statistic, it is a shocking look for the current government and its inability to get to grips with the situation.
Yes, the FF/FG government has thrown billions of euro at it - including a €9 billion allocation on delivery for 2026 alone - but it is clearly not helping enough of those who need it most.
According to the government's own figures, over 36,000 homes were delivered last year, up 20% on the previous year. Over 9,000 new-build social homes were delivered in 2025, the highest output on record.
There have been more than 86,000 housing commencements over the past two years. In the first three months of this year alone, there have been 8,400 commencements; that is up 184% year on year. Planning momentum is also strong with 8,000 permissions granted in the last three months of 2025 - up 20%.
So why, at a time of such unprecedented government spending in housing, has the eviction rate spiralled completely out of control?
The simple answer is that not enough of the government's money is being directed on building affordable and social housing for the thousands of families exposed to crippling rent hikes.
Surely the government, with the backing of opposition parties, need to be putting emergency legislation in place to remove the structural barriers to housing output, including unlocking land, reforming and accelerating planning, investing in water, energy and transport infrastructure and addressing viability challenges so homes can be built where they are needed quickly, as Waterford Fine Gael TD John Cummins has correctly articulated.
Other priorities include expanding construction capacity through apprenticeships and modern methods of construction and bringing vacant and derelict homes back into use through grants and a derelict property tax.
Long-term solutions can only be achieved through a united approach that is people-centered rather than a strategy consistently at the heart of political divisions.