The social contract is breaking. Ireland’s elites don’t see it yet

A former government advisor says the crisis is under control. He’s wrong. And the country is slipping away.

There’s something almost poetic—in that bitter, crumbling-lintel sort of way—about hearing Dr Alan Ahearne, the economist who famously warned of the 2008 Irish crash, sit comfortably in Athlone and declare, with all the cool detachment of a man who’s never had to pack up a life into a storage unit, that house prices will keep rising for years and there’s not much to be done about it. This all comes after half a decade of advising the Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

He doesn’t say it with malice. That would at least imply contact with emotion. No, he delivers it with the unblinking calm of a man who’s spent too long looking at spreadsheets and not enough time speaking to the nurses commuting from Cavan, the service staff crammed six-to-a-room in Tallaght, or the thirtysomethings being forced to leave the country their parents built; not because they want to, but because there’s nowhere left to live.

Ahearne, once branded “the man who told you so” after his early warning of the Celtic Tiger’s collapse, has returned to the stage via a Sunday Independent interview, and this time, it seems, he’s content to play the role of the man who shrugs. Asked why house prices continue to spiral, he says simply: “There’s just such strong demand.” Then he goes on: “Ireland has the strongest population growth in Europe… a strong economy, relatively low interest rates, very fast population growth, rising incomes… that’s all a recipe for big demand for housing and we’re not building 93,000 homes… we’re building 33,000.”

It’s not what he’s saying that’s the problem; it’s what he’s refusing to say.

Ahearne mentions population growth but refuses to interrogate where it’s coming from. In 2003, there were roughly 400,000 foreign-born residents in Ireland; about 10% of the population, with most of them from the United Kingdom. By 2023, that figure had reached 1.16 million with official residency; a staggering 21.5–22%. But that’s only the visible part. When you count the undocumented, temporary workers, asylum seekers, those under temporary protection and international students, the real foreign-born population will be much higher. Likely more than a quarter of the country; in a state that still exports its own youth by the plane-load.

None of this is to say that immigration is only a villain in this story. Many new arrivals prop up entire sectors. But a housing supply built for four million can’t stretch to five and a half million without consequence. If the State invites rapid population growth—for economic or humanitarian reasons—it must plan accordingly. It hasn’t.

What we have instead is a government happy to take the credit for GDP growth, while leaving everyone—immigrants and locals alike—scrambling for overpriced homes that don’t exist. And yet, Ahearne barely touches this. He refers offhandedly to workers commuting from Kent, as if it’s perfectly normal that we now import labour from abroad while waving their local peers off to Brisbane, Dubai and Toronto.

In one moment of surreal detachment, he recalls how, during the Celtic Tiger, “builders would fly in, pay €10 for a Ryanair flight… gangs of them… and then head back at the weekend. That’s all gone.” Now, he says wistfully, “those builders are in Poland where wages have risen… So that supply of labour is not available anymore.”

What exactly are we meant to take from this? That it was lovely while it lasted? That the miracle wasn’t the country’s economic model, but the temporary availability of low-paid Eastern European workers?

This is what elite thinking in Ireland looks like: a man whose job was to advise the cabinet on national economic policy can speak at length about the housing crisis without mentioning mass immigration, demographic shifts, birth rate collapse, or even the basic injustice of a system where Irish-born young people are priced out of their own country.

Ahearne says “I don’t know any plumber or bricklayer or quantity surveyor… who is unemployed.” That’s the punchline of his entire housing diagnosis. Not: where will families live? Not: why are birth rates collapsing? Not: what will happen to social cohesion when housing is treated as a luxury good. Just: “Who’s going to build those houses?”

When asked how many homes we need to be building, he shrugs again: “I’ve never found that question useful.” This is the voice of a man who’s been comfortably upstairs for so long he’s forgotten there’s a fire in the kitchen.

And if this is the prevailing attitude in the Taoiseach’s orbit—managerial, evasive, economically sound but socially hollow—then Ireland is in serious trouble.

Because what’s playing out is more than market imbalance. It’s a long-term unravelling of the social contract. People aren’t having children. Couples aren’t marrying. Emigration is rising. Cynicism is deepening. The sense that Ireland is a country you might visit but can no longer afford to inhabit is becoming gospel among the Wild Geese scattered around the planet.

There is a long and shameful tradition in Irish politics of treating emigration as a safety valve. If they’re not here, they can’t riot. They can’t vote you out. And they won’t embarrass you with the reality of your own failures.

But what happens when that valve breaks? When people can’t leave, or won’t? When those who stay behind—trapped in a rigged market, watching the State spend hundreds of millions on housing new arrivals while they sleep in box rooms—finally decide the system has to go?

First, build council homes; not shiny investor bait but permanent stock. Stop pretending the private sector will do what only the State can. Second, align immigration with infrastructure. A temporary cap on non-essential migration, paired with support for refugees and critical workers, isn’t xenophobia. It’s planning.

Ahearne says there won’t be a crash. Maybe he’s right. But not every collapse makes a sound you can chart on a graph. Some happen quietly; around kitchen tables, in waiting rooms, in the moment a young couple decides not to have a child because there’s nowhere to put a cot. That’s a rupture too. Just slower. And crueller.

You’d think that a man who survived one collapse might be alert to the warning signs of the next. But maybe the real lesson of 2008 isn’t that Ireland needs better economists; it’s that we need economists who still live in the country they’re talking about.

And when “let them eat cake” stops sounding like satire and starts reading like State strategy, it won’t be a housing crisis we’re facing anymore. It’ll be a reckoning.