Vanadalising housing

The far right and housing Part I

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“Want affordable housing? Help report illegal aliens in your area.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, December 2025

As the above quote from US Homeland Security indicates, the kind of politics that not so long ago was confined to the sewers of the internet, is now very much embedded in the most powerful institution in the world.

There is also an emerging movement influenced by international right wing trends here in Ireland, although as yet without significant political representation/influence. And ‘homes for the Irish’ is one of its most consistent rallying cries.

But, beyond the slogans, what do the far right really think about housing?

It’s an issue I’ve wanted to look into for some time. This is the first in a series of posts that will explore this topic in Ireland and internationally. My main aim here is to take these ideas seriously. Failure to do so, as I argue here, makes those of us whose view of housing is based on ideas like equality, democracy and solidarity, less equipped to defend those values in the face of the rising tide of xenophobic nationalism.

Today’s post delves into a recent book called Vandalizing Ireland: How the Government, NGOs, Academia and the Media Are Engineering a New Globalist Ireland, by Eoin Lenihan, that develops a right wing critique and places specific emphasis on housing (Lenihan was recently interviewed on the Irish Times Inside Politics podcast). The aim here isn’t to criticize, or indeed counter the arguments, it is purely to understand their political logic.

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone

I focus on housing in this post, but first a few words about the overall approach that characterizes Vandalising Ireland. I would situate the approach mainly within a romantic nationalist tradition that emphasises cultural continuity as defining ‘the soul of the nation’. Like a lot of romantic nationalism, it laments the passing of Ireland’s national culture. Lenihan thinks that our now defunct national culture is best expressed by the ‘fireside storytelling’ tradition (especially fairy stories) and a kind of ‘folk Christianity’ represented by the outlaw ‘hedge priests’ from the days of the Penal Laws. Why he seizes on these aspects of our cultural heritage is not specified. The book is not primarily ethno-nationalist or racist in tone, but the emphasis on a pure, unchanging culture obviously aligns fairly easily with that kind of politics.

The book is therefore a kind of anti-modernist polemic against Ireland’s liberal and globalised capitalist regime. In particular, he takes aim at our FDI dependent growth model, which he frames as continuing dependency on outside forces that cripples our independence. The major political parties, including Sinn Féin, are all handmaidens of this order since they are all wedded to the FDI model.

One more note in terms of background. One of Lenihan’s main arguments in the book is that the IPAS accommodation system is anti-democratic and anti-Irish. He argues that the Government imposed what he describes as a ‘plantation of unvetted males’ on ‘tight knit local communities’, without their consent. The way these communities were talked about by politicians and treated by police is a major bone of contention. While this relates to housing, because the IPAS system is not an area of housing policy I don’t discuss this any further here (read my colleague Bryan Fanning’s work on the IPAS system).

FDI, housing & immigration

Lenihan’s critique of the housing system shares many concerns that are common across the political spectrum. He cites central bank research around the relationship between property ownership and wealth inequality: “97% of the wealth in Ireland was held by property-owning individuals…. [P]rivate renters.. held just 3% of the wealth”. He focuses especially on the inability of young people to become homeowners.

He also makes the point, often cited on the left, that apartments are often purchased by investment funds before they ever come on the market. However, he equally blames Government, as AHBs and other non-market actors also engage in bulk apartment purchases.

These issues are driving ‘Ireland’s propertyless, educated and hardworking youth’ to emigrate for ‘a fairer shake abroad’.

But his main target is the FDI economic model which he sees as driving the housing crisis. This is because of the link between multinational companies and economic immigration, with the latter, according to Lenihan, the main driver of house prices:

“[The] radical increase in population has been overwhelmingly driven by mass legal immigration to service the FDI economy and it has directly led to the current housing crisis.”

No concrete evidence is presented in terms of the relationship between immigration and house prices (something I’ve discussed here), but Lenihan argues that:

“[F]oreign employees are earning at the very top end of the Irish employment scale. This means that immigrant workers in major tech companies are helping to price natives out of the housing market, adding to the frustrations of the 40% of working young people living at home with their parents.”

Immigrants on average earn less than Irish born households, but this is not a book that takes time to consider counter-evidence or nuance. Nevertheless, in some multinationals with above average wages, it is true that migrants disproportionately make up their work force. It’s easy to imagine these kind of arguments ringing true somewhere like Dublin’s North Inner City, for example, with its proximity to the IFSC and the ‘silicone docks’.

As mentioned, Lenihan views all political parties as complicit in the FDI take over and therefor the immigrant driven housing crisis. He also hones in on the failure of mainstream politicians (as he sees it) to discuss the relationship between housing and immigration:

“[N]o establishment politician acknowledged the root cause of strain on those social services—a population explosion caused by mass immigration, needed because of each party’s unwavering dependency on the tax-avoidance FDI economy”.

The spatial politics of the Celtic Tiger

The other main focus of Vandalising Ireland, as far as housing is concerned, relates to spatial and cultural politics. This is where his romantic nationalist perspective is most obvious. He argues, for example, that ‘the least valued element of identity throughout Ireland’s recent history has been the relationships between people, their landscapes, the oral tradition and how they blend to form binding communities’. Landscape and the oral tradition are seen as kind of vectors that make possible the transmission of the ‘soul of the nation’ from one generation to the next: ‘This connection between experience, landscape and fireplace marks the passing of everyday events into myth and shared identity’.

Although I’m not a nationalist, I am somewhat torn on this kind of perspective. I’m quite parochial by inclination and have a strong sense of place. Although I grew up in Stoneybatter, which is far removed from the rural west of Ireland that Lenihan reveres, I also have a nostalgic and somewhat romantic attachment to the place I come from. And although I don’t really like to say it publicly (because I fear it makes me sound like a bit of an idiot), I very strongly dislike how Stoneybatter has changed since I was a kid, and I find it incomprehensible that some people think it is a much better neighbourhood now than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. I’m also an Irish speaker and pretty hostile to the Americanisation of Irish culture, consumerism and so forth.

On the other hand, I found the constant appeals throughout the book to a bizarrely narrow vision of Irish culture, which seem largely based on the author’s idiosyncrasies, incomprehensible.

Getting back to housing, Lenihan’s argument is that the Celtic Tiger era property bubble, itself an offshoot of our FDI model, was linked to new spatial patterns of housing development which destroyed the last vestiges of authentic culture:

“[B]etween 1996 and 2006 the Irish economy was propped up by a building boom which peaked at a record 90,000 houses being built in 2006.⁠ Huge numbers of these houses were placed into ancient villages all across the country, induced by subsidies and tax incentives, particularly in rural areas. Because the majority of people taking up residence in these houses were Irish people looking for affordable housing in rural areas close to urban hubs where the FDI economy was based, little consideration was given to the long-term effects such a massive internal migration would have on community”.

This ‘internal migration’ undermined community as people became ‘transient, atomized commodities whose principal purpose was to man multinationals’. What followed was the catastrophic collapse of ‘our’ (or at least Lenihan’s) way of life:

“The connection between people and community was severed and the connection between people and landscape was shattered. Irish fireside tradition was uniquely predicated on people’s intimate knowledge of one another, the landscape and a high social value placed on continuity or rootedness via oral communication. Celtic Tiger Ireland was individualistic and anonymous. Social value was placed on TV and, shortly thereafter, on social media and virtual communities.”

These internal migration-led, tax incentivised, spatial patterns reduced Ireland to a nation of commuters and ‘secular, post-Catholic’ communities (or pseudo-communities) in a ‘multi-ethnic, globalised nation.’

In this vision, housing unaffordability is a symptom of FDI driven mass migration, and symbolic of the Governments prioritization of global capital over the ‘native Irish’. Patterns of housing development, driven by FDI driven internal migration, are central to the modernisation and atomization or what remains of our authentic culture.

Irish people today have therefore neither a literal home nor a cultural home. We are orphans of relentless economic globalisation and cultural modernisation, unmoored from soil and spirit. Our only purpose, to serve Michaél Martin’s ‘enterprise economy’.

Ultimately, like most forms of reactionary thinking, it all boils down to a simple credo: people should stay where they are, and who they are.

The above sounds like I might be unfairly characterizing Vandalizing Ireland, but I have actually downplayed the book’s central arguments to make them sound a little more plausible. In the book itself, the lamenting of our oral tradition etc. is truly ludicrous at points. One thing I took away from the book is that the liberal globalists among my readers can sleep easy, if Vandalising Ireland is anything to go by, the right are a long way from a serious political strategy.

On the other hand, if you look at the MAGA right in the US, or Farage in the UK, it is very clear that what is being peddled now is a more compelling, down to earth version of some of the arguments first put forward by eccentric intellectuals a couple of decades ago.

And some of what Lenihan says does resonate. Two aspects are worth mentioning here in particular. First, the FDI economy is associated with with employment and income dynamics that do indeed play a role in driving house prices/rents beyond the reach of many, particularly in the cities. The fact that some of these companies disproportionately hire migrants means this dynamic can easily be framed in nationalist terms. One of the most characteristic, and successful, strategies of the far right is to frame political economic tensions through the lens of cultural/ethnic conflict.

Second, our housing systems does feel divorced from a vision of ‘community’, or a sense of how/where we wish to live. It’s safe to say very few people think the housing system should prioritise Lenihan’s (literally) fairy tale communities. But many people would like a housing system that allowed them to live near their extended family or community or origin, or generally relate to a vision of what kind of nation we wish to live in.

Next week I’ll look at some more extreme but, worryingly, more politically appealing and analytically rigorous far right takes on housing politics. Brace yourself.

Events & news

Threshold will launch a new report (Renting on the Island of Ireland) next Tuesday.

What I’m reading

An interesting post from Progress Ireland looking at land speculation and the role it plays (or rather, doesn’t play) in house price inflation.