This is one of a series of articles on Ireland in 2025. Read Patrick Freyne’s essay here.
We’re living in a different Dublin. There’s no doubt about it. As a 30-year-old dividing the bulk of their time between the north inner city and Coolock, I’ve had a front-row seat to inconceivable transformation. I’ve seen the city disembowelled by austerity and the housing crisis. I’ve witnessed my hometown, Coolock, fall into national disrepute after years of industrial decline and decades of institutional neglect of its inhabitants.
Mass emigration has robbed me of my friends. It has robbed me of my ability to wander into town for a coffee alone and rely on the statistically-likely serendipity of a chance encounter with an acquaintance. I used to find so much joy in living in a city that is so often compared to a village. The streets might still be bustling with people (who are somehow willing to pay €5.90 for a Guinness), but it often feels like a ghost town. Friends have left for warmer weather, cheaper rent and better jobs, in cities with such dramatic time zone differences that they might as well have launched themselves into space.
Yet, for all my cribbing and crying, I have stuck around. Despite the extent to which people my age have emigrated, there is still a great sense of intergenerational community in Ireland – which is a large part of what keeps me here. You can feel how strong it is in areas like Coolock, where I can barely make it to the shops to meet my mam without being stopped for a chat by every 90-year-old woman living in my old estate.
When I do make it to the shopping centre, I see my mother facing the same problem, stopping and starting her procession from one end of Northside to the other, greeting every individual she sees as if she were the Lord Mayor of Coolock. It used to frustrate me as an impatient child, but now I soak it all in. It’s a good thing.
There’s a great deal of solidarity between people in Coolock – despite the division and fractures in the community depicted by media. It’s a community that has been built on mutual struggles like industrial disputes and rent strikes – with Coolock playing a major role in rent strikes in the 1970s. During the 1970s when the Council wouldn’t build playgrounds, the people in Coolock came together and built them themselves.
So yes, I love Ireland too much to leave. But it’s a one-sided relationship, where my devotion is rarely reciprocated. As tends to be the case in toxic relationships, I often feel drained and taken for granted.
One dilemma for me as a renter in Dublin, and a tenant of a build-to-rent complex, is the fact that my landlord is one of the largest private landlords in the country. The eye-watering rent I pay every month goes into a foreign pension fund, belonging to people who’ll have the privilege of being entirely oblivious as to where their lump sum has come from when they turn 65.
It makes me yearn for the days of genuine social housing initiatives, when renters knew with certainty that their contributions went straight back into the Irish economy. Surprisingly, this didn’t come up much in housing debates in advance of the election. Does it speak to the lack of diversity within our Government when it comes to social class? Having seen the impact of social housing first-hand in Coolock, I view it as an absolutely worthwhile investment and one of the few options that puts something back into the exchequer, too.
It’s hard to imagine there was once an Ireland where people didn’t have to feel this way
— Kelly Earley
Despite my complaints, I know I am lucky. As someone who has been burned by a ‘mom and pop’ landlord previously, my accommodation feels stable to me.There are too many risks involved with small-time landlords to feel secure in this economy. You don’t know if a small, necessary repair request will prompt the landlord to turf you out and sell up. In the past, I found myself terrified to ask for my deteriorating, creaky spring mattress to be replaced, despite the fact it was older than a Junior Cert student (and covered in as much fake tan, thanks to the previous tenant).
Simple requests make you feel difficult and demanding, reminding you that you can be removed and replaced due to the obscene demand for rental accommodation here. Once you have been evicted, that’s when the real trouble starts. In 2022, I applied for over 100 properties in three months and was invited to just three viewings. Queues of prospective tenants wrapped around the corner before me at two of these viewings.
I can’t fathom how deep the fear is for families who are responsible for housing young children. I have seen people endure rodents, broken boilers and mould, while subjected to living situations that their landlords would never allow their own children to live in. For renters, the crisis informs many of the decisions we make, both big and small. It occupies so much space in my mind, even with the bit of security I have been able to latch on to.
It’s hard to imagine there was once an Ireland where people didn’t have to feel this way. I’m sticking around because I’m still dreaming that someday I’ll get to see it.
Kelly Earley is a writer on Substack: see kellysrubbish.substack.com
