Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-16
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Peadar Tóibín (AON), Meath West

The housing crisis has had varied and wide ramifications in Irish society. One of them is a serious fall in the fertility rate in this State. There has been a 30% fall in the number of births annually. There has been a 20,000 fall in the number of births annually since Celtic tiger times. Some 69% of people aged 25 years or under are living with their parents. Well over 40% of adults who are under 30 are living with their parents. That is changing the very nature of Irish society. The ability for adults to form relationships to have children is being deleted for hundreds of thousands of people. This is having massive ramifications. Schools are now noticing that there is a fall in the number of children being enrolled. An unbalanced demographic structure has serious consequences for our workforce and our pensions. Planning, permitting, licensing, tendering and judicial reviews here are among the slowest in the whole of the European Union. While the Taoiseach's Government has announced plans, they are not ambitious enough and I do not believe they will be implemented in a timely fashion.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-16