Cost of Living Issues
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-15
============================================================

Louise O'Reilly (SF), Dublin Fingal West

The Minister mentioned the rate of inflation and did not mention the rate of housing inflation, the cost of housing. That was specifically mentioned in the question.
The cost of housing in this State is rising and has risen every single year, whether people are renting or are struggling to buy. After housing costs, 40% of renters live on an income below the poverty line. That is 43% for local authority tenants. It is almost 60% for those on HAP, RAS or rent supplement, who are living below the poverty line when we take it into account. The Minister is not getting the full picture if he is not taking into account the cost of housing. Perhaps in a normal economy where the Government had not crashed the housing market repeatedly into a wall, leaving out housing figures might give an accurate picture, but it does not, because when we take housing into consideration, we actually see the true rate of poverty and the fact that Social Justice Ireland, the ESRI and others pointed out that the increases in the last budget did not do anything other than impose austerity on people and do not keep pace with the rising costs.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-15