Council publishes data on nationalities on social-housing list

While drawing up its new "scheme of lettings", its blueprint for how to prioritise people in the long queue for social housing, Dublin City Council did an equality and human rights assessment.

The council's chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, had said that as part of its commitment to addressing equality and human rights issues, it would do these assessments on existing and new policies, strategies, and plans.

They looked at gender, civil status, family status, age, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, membership of the Traveller community, and socio-economic status, the scheme of lettings says.

"In this way we ensure the development and ongoing implementation of this Letting Scheme reflects and gives effect to our values of dignity and respect, diversity and accessibility, inclusion and social justice, participation and engagement, and choice and autonomy," the scheme says.

For example, the assessment threw up a recommendation that the scheme be amended to say that people who needed extra help applying for housing via the choice-based lettings system – due to literacy challenges, for example – could request support to get that.

When independent Councillor Gavin Pepper requested data from the council on the "nationality/citizenship" of people allocated social housing, among other figures, Dublin Region Homeless Executive Director Mary Hayes wrote that the council had not previously reported on that.

But, following the equality and human rights assessment, "it was agreed that equality monitoring would be undertaken annually. From 2026 the Council will include this reporting annually in its end of year report." And she provided the data.

And now Pepper is using the numbers for a purpose that, perhaps, the council didn't foresee.

While the council's current system of allocating social housing is based largely on who needs it the most, Pepper has said he wants to change that to bar anyone who's not an Irish citizen from the queue altogether.

Pepper is just one of the city's 63 councillors, though. And a recent survey published by the Hope and Courage Collective, anti-extremism non-profit, found that the majority of Irish people think Ireland has benefited from people coming and making the country their home.

Arguments about who gets social housing are making the community less safe for everyone, said Niamh McDonald, director of community engagement and advocacy at the collective.

She pointed to "graffiti on houses, local mobilisation and intimidation in communities and threats towards Dublin City Council staff, all driven by a small few anti immigrant actors".

The Hope and Courage Collective believes that "no matter who you are, where you come from, the colour of your skin or how you pray we all deserve to have access to safe warm affordable homes", she said.

At the sharp end

Dublin City Council's application for social housing support asks for both the nationality, and the citizenship, of the person filling it in, a council spokesperson said Tuesday.

About 42 percent of households on the social housing waiting list had a non-Irish "nationality", according to figures from Dublin City Council in response to Pepper's queries.

"The information provided is based on the Head of Household and does not provide a breakdown of family members' nationality," the council spokesperson said Tuesday.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) used to ask people their nationality in its censuses, but it switched that question in 2022, to ask about citizenship, instead.

So we know that about 21 percent of people in the Dublin City Council area "had non-Irish citizenship" at the 2022 census, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO). But not the share that had non-Irish nationalities.

Even beyond the nationality/citizenship mismatch, though, this is a very imperfect comparison. The council is counting households, while the CSO is counting people. And the CSO data is about four years old.

But it is likely that non-Irish citizens are over-represented on the social housing waiting list to some extent, in the sense that a higher share are on the social housing waiting list, than in the population in general.

This would be unsurprising, says Keire Murphy, a former researcher for the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). "Migrants are really at the sharp end of the housing crisis," she says.

For starters, most people who have Irish nationality (75 percent) are already homeowners, according to the 2022 Monitoring Report on Integration, of which Murphy was a co-author.

And homeowners aren't in the rough-and-tumble of the housing market, trying and trying to get a place to rent from a private landlord – or sitting on social housing lists for years, waiting to get rent a home from a council.

"Non-Irish" people are in a very different position. Only 31.5 percent are homeowners, and only 5 percent are in social housing. So loads (63.5 percent) are trying to rent in the private sector, the report says.

Surely connected, with rents so high, a far higher share of foreign-born people (29.3 percent) than Ireland-born people (8.5 percent) are paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing, it says.

So even while a slightly higher share of foreign-born people than Ireland-born people (aged 25 to 34) have third-level education, and are employed – foreign-born people have lower incomes, and more are facing consistent poverty, the report says.

"Basically, all those things make migrants more likely to fall into need for social housing," says Murphy.

Housing based on need

Ireland's government is not short of money. The government keeps announcing higher and higher annual corporate tax receipts.

Yet it has not converted these billions of euro into the numbers of affordable homes in Dublin that it says are needed.

Surely connected: the number of people in Dublin who are homeless has been on a trend upward for years.

In this situation, the council rations housing, triaging people who come asking for help.

First, the council assesses if they are eligible. That depends on their income, whether they have a local connection to the council area they are applying in, and also on their immigration/residence status.

People have lots of different situations, but for example, people from other EU countries are likely eligible, if they can show they're "habitually resident" in Ireland.

Meanwhile, people seeking asylum are not eligible for social housing or other housing supports at all. Although, if they are successful, and granted international protection, "they have the same access to housing support as Irish citizens", a spokesperson for the Department of Housing said Tuesday.

Next, among people who are deemed eligible to apply for for social housing, the council prioritises based on its "scheme of lettings", which councillors have the last word on.

They've decided that people should get priority for a variety of reasons: if they are living in unfit accommodation, if they have exceptional medical needs, that kind of thing.

Also, at least 21 percent of social housing allocations are “directed to households who are in emergency accommodation”, a council spokesperson said in July.

If someone is in one of the higher priority groups, they can get housed faster than someone who's been on the waiting list for longer.

So, unsurprisingly, there are, periodically, pushes to get other groups priority on the scheme of lettings. For example, last year, there was an effort to prioritise survivors of industrial schools for social housing in Dublin city.

Councillors say it is almost impossible to weigh up the needs of the different groups of vulnerable people that are looking for social homes. 

“It is just an incredibly difficult situation,” says Social Democrats Councillor Catherine Stocker last year. “It’s heart-breaking really.”

Among those who are eligible, being a refugee does not give a person priority, or boost them closer to the front of the queue. And the council does not prioritise based on nationality, it says.

"All allocations are made in accordance with the adopted scheme of lettings," Hayes, of the DRHE, wrote to councillors recently when delivering the numbers Pepper had asked for about the nationalities of people on the housing list.

"Nationality or citizenship has no bearing on a household's offer of housing," Hayes wrote.

Housing based on nationality

In some other countries, meanwhile, far-right parties are pushing to change the way social housing is allocated, so it's also based on nationality or citizenship.

For example, in France, the Rassemblement National has for years been calling for French citizens to be prioritised in the queue for social housing.

In Britain Nigel Farage said in June that his Reform UK party would ban "foreign nationals" from living in social housing.

Tenants would be required to find private accommodation within three months or face deportation, Farage said, according to the BBC.

Pepper, the independent councillor, appeared on The Niall Boylan Podcast after that, and Boylan asked him about it.

"Do you believe that, for example, in relation to housing, currently at the moment in Ireland, should you have to be working here, or resident for a certain period of time, or indeed as some people might say, an Irish citizen, before you're entitled to housing?" Boylan asked.

"Absolutely, you should have to be an Irish citizen before you're entitled to social housing," Pepper said.

And then, later Boylan came back to the same question again.

"Are you telling me that you believe, like Nigel Farage, that they shouldn't be entitled to social housing? And Nigel Farage says you pay for your own accommodation or you get deported," Boylan asked.

"Yeah, I agree with Nigel Farage," Pepper said.

The details matter

How would this work in practice?

A blanket change barring anyone who is not an Irish citizen from eligibility for social housing would appear to immediately be on course to hit some major legal obstacles.

For example, currently, UK and EU citizens are eligible for social housing under certain conditions. Pepper is proposing to change that. How would that impact Ireland's relationships with the UK and the EU?

Also, is he proposing only basing eligibility on citizenship, or would there be additional nuances to that?

For example, should someone born and raised in America, to parents born and raised in America, who has never been to Dublin but who gets Irish citizenship because their granny was Irish, be eligible for social housing?

What about someone born and raised in Dublin, whose parents were born and raised in Dublin, but whose grandparents came here from, say, Nigeria?

Also, what should happen to people who aren't judged eligible for social housing under the new criteria, whatever they are – and who cannot find social housing, but do not have a family's box room to fall back on?

Should they have access to homeless services? Or just be left to sleep rough? Or told to somehow "go back where they came from", even if it far, and expensive to get there, and very unsafe, like Gaza, for example?

Would there be any exceptions to this policy for, say, families with children?

And if the idea is that some people living and working here should not have access to social housing if they need that, then would they be allowed to pay less tax to the state since they'll be getting less of a social safety net?

Pepper has not responded to a request sent 22 September for an interview to discuss these questions, and has not answered a series of similar questions sent in writing at that time.

What's the government's view on barring access to social housing for non-Irish nationals, or prioritising Irish nationals?

"The key consideration in an allocation scheme is the needs and requirements of the household concerned," a Department of Housing spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Making the case

In a recent edition of his newsletter The Week in Housing, UCD lecturer Michael Byrne wrote about the pushes for "national priority" in housing in France, Britain, and Ireland.

"For those who do not believe that Irish natives should be prioritised, or that the allocation system should be changed in some way that leads to better outcomes for natives, the challenge is to develop a clearer argument," Byrne wrote.

The housing crisis is real. So is the cost-of-living crisis. And lots of people are under pressure and angry.

Some 79 percent of respondents believe working class people struggle with housing and bills because the rules are rigged against them, according to a report that the Hope and Courage Collective published this April, which related the findings of nationally representative surveys in 2024 and 2025 – of more about 3,000 people each time.

The surveys also showed that the "vast majority" of people in Ireland "believe as a country we have benefited from people coming and making Ireland their home, this diversity is a strength", says McDonald, director of community engagement and advocacy at the collective.

The number was 64 percent in 2024, and 66 percent in 2025, with a margin of error of 2 percent, the report says.

There's a big gap between this reality, and the high-visibility that anti-immigrant narratives get in public debate, according to the report, which is titled Mind the Gap.

"While support for hardline positions remains limited, social media, particularly X, enabled relatively small networks to generate high visibility and national reach," the report says. "This allowed narratives with minority backing to disproportionately influence public debate and set the terms of discussion."

Solution

"People absolutely should be angry and upset by the lack of public and affordable housing and the 1,000s on housing waiting lists and in homeless services," said McDonald.

"As communities we should be coming together, to demand the homes we all need," she said. "We all deserve communities where everyone feels safe and have what they need to thrive – No exceptions."

At the moment, people are arguing over who gets "the last lifeboats on the Titanic", says Murphy, the former ESRI researcher.

"Which is a terrible situation to be in, and it is a massive policy failure, a massive governance failure," she said.

"We shouldn't be having a shit fight about who is getting the scraps of our housing system," she said. "The solution should be: we build enough, especially social and affordable housing that we can look after everyone in the state."