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23rd June 2025
11:41am BST
Ireland's housing crisis has weighed heavily on the shoulders of too many generations, and it feels like things will never improve.
The latest Daft.ie report has confirmed how bad things are, with house prices hitting a 10-year high in Ireland.
Housing prices nationally rose by an average of 3% during the second quarter of 2025, Daft.ie confirmed.
The typical listed price nationwide was €357,851, 12.3% higher than a year previously and 40% higher than at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The current rate of inflation in the market is the highest seen in the past 10 years since mortgage market rules were introduced.
The surge in inflation is relatively broadly based, with the Dublin figure (12.3%) in line with the average for the rest of the country.
In the rest of Leinster, the annual increase in prices is 14.3%. Inflation is also close to the national average in Galway city (12.5%) and Limerick city (12.8%). In Waterford city, the rate is higher again (15.2%), while in Cork city (8.6%), the increase in prices is slower.
The number of second-hand homes available to buy nationwide on June 1st stood at close to 12,100. This is largely unchanged from the figure a year ago and less than half the pre-COVID average of almost 25,000.
The hope of ever owning your own house is something that becomes further out of reach as we continue to be hit with headlines and news bulletins about overpriced homes we'll never step foot in.
Owning a home was a given for my parents' generation. They simply needed a letter from their employer and a month's salary saved to buy a place to call home.
Now it feels like we need to be that lucky EuroMillions winner in Cork to own a home.
The never-ending hurdles, the rising prices, and the constant bad news have left an entire generation feeling hopeless.
It feels like there are simply too many hurdles in our way to even attempt to buy somewhere to live.
Working full-time, paying taxes, and attempting to save should be enough. The odds should be in our favour, but that couldn't be further from the reality.
But what other options are there? Move to Australia and leave the lives we've built in Ireland behind? Share a house with six other people and pay an extortionate rent to an awful landlord? Live at home in our teenage bedrooms and miss out on feeling independent?
There's no solution to this problem. There isn't a lot the public can do despite raising our voices, protesting, and hoping the Government one day realises what a mess we're in and how wrong it is for so many of us to have no home to call our own.
But with so many landlords and TDs with blinkers on in the Dáil, what hope do we really have about things ever changing?
It's an issue many members of the Government likely never faced in their lifetimes. An issue they don't care to truly acknowledge, or even fix.
Knowing I'll likely be the first generation of my family to never own a home was something that made me feel embarrassed, but the only shame here lies on the Irish government's shoulders.
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