This video makes me incredibly angry. Working in housing for about a year completely changed my perspective on this country and the housing crisis. There are loads of different aspects to it. The government being ran by incompetent grifters, vulture funds, landlords, planning. You’re allowed to talk about all of those. But nobody wants to address the immigrant elephant in the room. Over two years ago I worked as a doorman in a brand new apartment building. Hundreds of lovely modern apartments. In the middle of a housing crisis you’d assume I’d have thought, brilliant, hundreds of homes for people. No, I wasn’t impressed. Up until then immigration wasn’t an issue I really cared about. My attitude towards it was basically that the world is free and people should be able to go wherever they want. About a month working there changed my perspective completely. I could count on one hand the number of Irish residents I’d actually dealt with. Obviously I didn’t have everyone’s nationality in front of me, but I estimate from working there was about 95% of the residents I encountered were non-Irish. And here’s the part that really pissed me off. The housing company was offering residents hundreds upon hundreds of euro in One4all vouchers if they successfully referred someone else to rent an apartment. Through the course of the job I’d see emails about residents referring friends from the other side of the world, including people who weren’t even living in Ireland yet. Most of them through ridiculous student visas. I remember sitting there thinking, are we actually taking the piss? We apparently don’t have enough housing for the people already here. Young Irish people are living with their parents well into adulthood. We have mothers raising children in hostels and emergency accommodation. And in the middle of all that, parts of the rental market were literally handing out hundreds of euro to encourage existing tenants to bring in even more renters. Now, that’s not the fault of some fella who gets offered an apartment and takes it. I’d take it too. The problem is the absolute gobshites running a country where housing policy and immigration policy apparently never have to meet each other. You cannot have a severe housing shortage, rapidly increase the number of people who need somewhere to live, fail miserably to build enough homes, and then act scandalised when someone suggests those things might be connected. So when I see videos of young Irish people like this, or mothers documenting what it’s like trying to raise their children in hostels, it genuinely makes my blood boil. It also reminds me how lucky I am. I have family who’ll put a roof over my head. Plenty of people don’t. Immigration didn’t cause Ireland’s housing crisis. Anyone saying it did would be talking shite. Put it has been the throwing petrol over a fire. And afaik, major apartment builds are required to provide a certain amount of social housing now. In this case one building was social housing. I walk past it every day, I’ve never seen an Irish person walk in or out the building. It’s not hateful to point out the obvious about immigration and housing in Ireland. The more this conversation is avoided, the more obvious it’ll get. My only worry is what language we’ll eventually have it in.