The Return of the Land Question in Modern Ireland

Ireland’s housing crisis in historical and international perspective

I spent my early career working on the economic history of nineteenth century Ireland, particularly the post-famine period. One of the biggest issues in Irish economic history (after the Famine) is land reform. Basically, there was a huge ‘Land Question’ that preoccupied politicians in Westminster from the 1870s up until 1903, and as Irish politicians began to hold the balance of power the solution to this nuisance was to transfer ownership of the land from landlords to their tenant’s.

I have written a fair few papers on this, here’s one looking at the social movement that put pressure on the state to introduce land reform, here’s another one explaining the mechanics of the land settlement, and one looking explicitly at the financial instruments used to fund the land transfers). Problem solved and the rest is history. Well, not quite.

At the end of last year (in my pre-substacking days!) I noticed something unusual in the Irish eviction statistics: they were at levels I had not seen since I looked at figures of evictions in the 19^th century. The number 5,000 is something ingrained in my mind because of work I had done on the Land War – back then it was around 5,000 evictions annually. In 2025 there were reports of 5,000 evictions per quarter, so approximately 20,000 a year!

I posted a figure of annual eviction rates from my PhD thesis on Linkedin and, surprisingly, had a lot of engagement – helped in no small part by being noticed by Ireland’s leading housing economist. One very insightful comment was that Irish evictions appeared to be higher than other OECD countries – more on this below.

Figure 1 Number of Evictions in Ireland, 1849-1920

That led me to write a short piece with a former colleague of mine Richard Mc Mahon (a historian based at MIC, Limerick). Which we published on the RTE Brainstorm (the original article came out on 5 February). In the piece we made a comparison of modern day evictions with the experience in the nineteenth century. The number of notices of termination was higher than eviction data we had for the nineteenth century, although the number of people affected was less given the fall in household size. Again, we were surprised with the reaction to the piece, this time amplified by an article appearing in the Irish Times.

Unbeknownst to ourselves, the comparison with the famine had hit a nerve. It was mentioned a few times in the Dáil (the Irish parliament). So we updated our analysis. Below is an expanded version of the draft we sent into the Irish Times (published on Wednesday), and a few other thoughts (some personal reflections on being evicted and also a radical solution).

The ‘Plain Stupid’ Debate Over Ireland’s Eviction Crisis

[this is an extended draft of an article co-authored with Richard McMahon that appeared in the print edition of the Irish Times]

Ireland is currently experiencing a crisis in the rental market with eviction figures not seen on this island since the mid-19^th century. The most recent daft.ie Rental Report also shows that rents have risen and that housing availability remains low, adding to the pressures felt by renter households.

In February this year, we wrote an article for RTE Brainstorm about the rise in eviction notices highlighting how Ireland has likely not seen evictions of this magnitude ‘since the 1850s’.

The article was based on data from the Residential Tenancy Board (RTB) that showed notices of termination up to the third quarter of 2025. We did not know what the total figure would be like for 2025, but we speculated that it would be as high, if not higher, than 2023 when eviction notices reached 19,011. This turned out to be the case.

The total number of notices of termination received by the RTB was 20,033 in 2025, a 21 percent annual increase from 2024. While the number of notices of termination had actually fallen in the last quarter of 2025, this appears to have been a stay of execution. The first quarter of 2026 witnessed a rapid increase in eviction rates, up 36 percent from the previous quarter and 50 percent higher than the numbers seen in the first quarter of 2025.

In Figure 2 the raw number of eviction notices from the RTB are presented alongside an eviction rate. The latter is constructed using the total number of private tenancies registered with the RTB as the denominator. This is done to compare like with like. A rough back-of-the envelope calculation suggests that there are roughly 100,000 rental properties not registered with the RTB (that is comparing the RTB private rentals with the number of rental properties reported in the 2022 Census). If this is the case, then the RTB data may understate both the total number of tenancies and the number of eviction notices. That caveat notwithstanding, the figure points to a substantial increase in evictions.

Figure 2 Eviction Notices and Annualised eviction Rate

The immediate culprit for the rise in notices of termination was the anticipation of new legislation coming into force for new tenancies in March 2026. The new regulations, while well intentioned, had inadvertently caused eviction notices to spike. The new regulations placed caps on rent increases at either 2% a year or in line with the rate of inflation, alongside athe introduction of a 6-year minimum duration tenancy. It also introduced restrictions on the sale of rental properties depending on landlord size, distinguishing between corporate landlords and smaller landlords with fewer than three properties. Importantly, these regulations applied only to tenancies agreed after the legislation came into force.

The main stated reason for notices of termination was landlord intention to sell their property, effectively exiting the rental market. This is clear in RTB data where the number of landlords intending to sell their property rose from 3226 in the final quarter of 2025 to 4259 in the first quarter of 2026.

Looking solely at the figures provided by the RTB, this level of ejectment notices does not appear to compare favourably to that seen in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. For instance, in the pre-Famine years of the early 1840s, there were an average of 5,000 civil bill ejectments brought against circa 14,000 defenfants annually in a country with a much larger population of over eight million people.

Another comparison is more revealing: the rate of evictions relative to the number of households. Between 1855 and 1877, the eviction rate was 0.14 per 100 holdings, rising to 0.48 per 100 during the Land War. Again, using the 2022 census figure of 1.95 million households, the rate implied by the 2025 RTB data is roughly one eviction notice per 100 households (and higher if we only consider rented households). Most of these notices do not lead to formal evictions but they often likely have the effect of causing tenants to vacate the property. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the rates of people leaving properties on the foot of termination notices are by no means out of line with those found, at times, in the 19^th century.

‘Plain Stupid’?

Our post highlighting the comparison between eviction notices in the present and those in the nineteenth century has become a talking point for opposition parties in Ireland. Labour were the first to highlight this in March, with Deputy Conor Sheehan noting that Ireland was living through the ‘highest rate of evictions since the Famine’. This particular claim was fact checked by The Journal, who concluded that ‘this was mostly true’, albeit their fact checking was based on a haphazard re-reading of the underlying sources of the RTE Brainstorm article.

The Famine reference resurfaced last week, this time from Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald. The Taoiseach’s response was that it was ‘just plain stupid to go on about the greatest evictions since the famine’. For Micheál Martin, a former history teacher and history graduate from UCC, to so easily dismiss this historical comparison is surprising.

In our original article we were careful to state that Ireland in 2026 is very different from the Ireland of the nineteenth century, but it is important also to stress that comparisons of this kind, while complex, are standard practice among economic and social science historians seeking to identify long-term trends and patterns. The Taoiseach did not elaborate on his comment other than to claim that to raise these findings is ‘not being serious about our housing problems’.

Historical research can illuminate our present circumstance by highlighting not only remarkable changes and transformations in our economic, social and political life, but also enduring features – in particular, how, despite extraordinary changes in Irish society and changes in land ownership and control, inequalities and imbalances of power in the relationships between landlord and tenants are again marked features of Irish life.

This is the case nearly 150 years after Irish farmers and labourers combined to challenge the overweening power of landlords during the Land War. The contemporary solution to this was tenant-proprietorship and tenurial security. Security of tenure became central to Irish political identity, and this was only achieved through agitation on the ground, culminating in state-funded mortgages that transferred assets (land and homes thereon) from landlords to tenants.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that tenants today are in a weaker position in their relationship with landlords than they were at the foundation of the state. This is most obviously reflected in the high rate of eviction in Ireland in the present day. For the Taoiseach to dismiss drawing attention to historical parallels suggests that they are irrelevant to government thinking and that the heavy policy emphasis, on the part of the Taoiseach, on the idea that ‘supply’ alone can solve the housing crisis is largely divorced from wider considerations of fairness and social justice that motivated some major Irish political leaders in the past.

In fact, while the Taoiseach was right to highlight the ‘continued growth’ in the housing supply, RTB data show that the increase in private tenancies was only 40% of the number of eviction notices issued in the first quarter of the year (see figure 3). There is clearly a fundamental problem in Ireland’s housing market.

Figure 3: Eviction Notices and Changes in Private Tenancies

The RTB data suggest that growth in Ireland’s rental sector is increasingly concentrated among larger landlords. While the total number of landlords and smaller landlords has remained relatively flat since 2024, the number of landlords with very large portfolios has grown rapidly. In particular, landlords with more than 100 tenancies increased by almost 70 per cent between Q2 2023 and Q1 2026. This points towards an increasing concentration of ownership within the rental market, even as overall growth in the sector appears to have slowed. The increasing concentration of rental property ownership raises uncomfortable historical parallels with earlier systems of concentrated landownership in Ireland.

Figure 4: Change in Landlords by Portfolio Size

Missing the real issue

Societies tend to reach for historical analogies in times of crisis. While the historical comparison was revealing, the more pertinent point that we originally made is that Ireland has one of the highest eviction rates in the OECD. Only an estimated 1% or less of renters appear subject to eviction orders annually in much of Western Europe, but the rate in Ireland based on census rental household figures for 2022 is now 3.89%. If we only use RTB data on evictions and private tenancies, and exclude non-registered rental properties, this rate is even higher at over 8.22% - that is higher than the United States, which has very high rates by international standards and, as a result, high levels of homelessness; a dynamic that is increasingly visible in Ireland.

Figure 5: Initiated Eviction proceedings

Despite the vast wealth generated in Ireland in the past two decades, why does Ireland have such trouble housing its people? Perhaps the more important comparison is not with Ireland’s past, but with Ireland’s peers in the present. The uncomfortable truth is that many renters in contemporary Ireland now experience levels of insecurity that would seem extraordinary elsewhere in the OECD. This is something that should be a great cause of concern to policymakers in Dublin and should be subjected to further analysis rather than the ‘supply will solve everything’ approach evident in the Taoiseach’s contributions to last week’s Dáil debate. These facts are plain and there is nothing stupid about acknowledging them.

Some lived experience

I have rented in both Ireland and Scotland and have experienced eviction in both countries.

My Scottish experience was understandable. When I first moved to Scotland I had rented an apartment and there were repeated issues with the central heating. After a series of attempts to repair it, the owner was told they would be required to replace the entire system. This must have been more than the owner had intended to invest in the property, so shortly after they decided to sell the property and let the next person deal with it. Fair enough. I was given notice of eviction and I had to find a new place to live. This was back in the early 2010s, so there were no supply constraints. I also was a household of one, so nothing to worry about. I found a new apartment within two weeks and I moved on with my life. The key insight, evictions are part and parcel of being a renter: when the owner’s interests no longer align with that of the tenant’s.

My second experience was in Ireland, this I was renting a house in the 2020s and I was no longer a household of one. This experience was much more stressful. The owner again decided to “sell”, although this time the circumstances were more ambiguous (and the rental was not registered with the RTB). The owner was accommodating (given we had a child in school) and gave us a fair amount of time to find somewhere to go, but an eviction it certainly was. Business is business, but it was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. Why? Because Ireland’s housing market is chaotic. There were simply no houses available to rent. When properties become available people were queueing to see them. Landlords expected would-be tenants to arrive prepared with bank statements, payslips, employer references, and references from previous landlords. Rents were high (and higher now) and landlords wanted equivalent of 2 to 3 months’ rent in advance (a small fortune!). In the end the rental house was put up for sale as promised, but within 6 months it was off the market and back up for rent at a higher rate.

So, two very different experiences of eviction. The main lesson is that when eviction interact with scarcity, the situation is much more precarious leading to knock on effects for people and families security, mental health, and well being.

Radical Georgist reforms?

If eviction becomes dangerous mainly because housing is scarce, then the deeper issue is land and the ownership of scarce urban space. This links back to the ideas of Henry George, the American political economist best known for the influential nineteenth-century text Progress and Poverty.

Henry George was one of the more interesting figures during the Irish Land War. He is also associated with one of the least known of the 19^th century ‘isms’. Leo Tolstoy believed that, ‘People do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply do not know it… for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree’.

Niall Whelehan and I wrote a piece for the RTE Brainstorm arguing for a Georgist interpretation of Ireland’s housing crisis. George became fascinated by Ireland during the Land War because he saw landlordism as one of the clearest examples of how concentrated ownership of land distorted society and politics. His ideas would go on to influence Michael Davitt and sections of the Land League movement.

George’s main argument was simple enough. Land is different from other assets because its supply is fixed. As economies grow and populations increase, rising land values generate enormous gains for landowners while increasing costs for tenants and workers. In other words, housing crises are often really land crises. George believed the solution was radical land reform and a universal land tax.

Independent Ireland believed it had largely solved this “Land Question” through land reform and tenant proprietorship. Security of tenure became central to Irish political identity. The image of the landlord extracting rents from insecure tenants supposedly belonged to the past.

Yet many of these tensions have now reappeared in urban form. The issue is no longer agricultural land but housing and rental property. Scarcity has created substantial gains for property owners while increasing insecurity for renters. The rise in eviction notices and homelessness reflects not simply a shortage of buildings but a deeper imbalance in the relationship between property ownership and housing need.

This is also why an exclusive focus on “supply” can sometimes miss the point. George was not anti-market, but he did believe that owners of scarce land could extract gains created by wider social and economic development. The uncomfortable possibility is that independent Ireland did not fully solve the land question so much as displace it into the modern housing market.

These arguments remain relevant far beyond Ireland. Although these proposals are unlikely to garner support when property interests are embedded within political institutions.[i] Or, as the former Taoiseach of Ireland put it, ‘one person’s rent is another person’s income’.

Smithian Conclusion

Given I started substacking to largely to write about Adam Smith, it is only fitting to end with him. There is, after all, a Smith quote for almost every occasion:

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

I use this quote at the end of my recent book, but it seems particularly relevant here. Ireland is now one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Yet homelessness is at record levels and housing insecurity has become a defining feature of life for a growing share of the population. Recent work by colleagues at Heriot-Watt University for Crisis has documented similar trends elsewhere, particularly in countries where housing markets have become increasingly financialised.

What strikes me about the Irish case is that this is not primarily a story about poverty. Ireland performs relatively well on many conventional measures of income inequality. Yet it performs much less well when it comes to wealth inequality. Housing sits at the centre of this divide. For homeowners, rising property values have generated substantial wealth. For renters, rising rents and increasing insecurity have made it more difficult to accumulate assets and plan for the future.

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[i] A number of representatives in Ireland are landlords and a number had unregistered rental properties who are more represented in the legislatures.