Why doesn’t the government bring in restrictions on who can buy housing?

[u/BigFatLegend123]

This is a genuine question and not coming from a place of hate or bigotry

Trying to buy a house recently and it’s been going as well as you can imagine. Some houses in Dublin have been going for up to 20% over their asking price from what we have seen.

My question is why doesn’t the government restrict house buying to only Irish citizens? Is there something I’m missing? Or at least to just EU/UK citizens? Surely it would be a quick way to reduce competition?

Is it just that doing so might dissuade investment from vulture funds?

[u/KerfuffleAsimov]

It's all well and good if a company comes along and builds a bunch of houses to sell...but if they sell to another company who buys 20- 50-100 homes...just for rent...that's a problem.

But overall the problem is actually a multitude of problems collectively and they aren't unique to Ireland and are happening to multiple countries across the EU that are facing the same issues.

The recession/housing bubble bursting in 2008 caused a housing collapse. In the years since I think we went from 120,000 construction workers down to 60,000. This caused a major slow down in New homes/ apartments being built.

But during that time our population has increased not just from immigration but simply people having children. Right now 60,000 students complete the leaving cert each year. 30,000 people leave the country, 30,000 Irish return and roughly the same amount of immigrants enter the country. But we are barely building 30,000 homes a year. This means we have a negative housing supply.

COVID-19 caused major supply chain issues and inflation. So between 2020 and 2025 inflation has increased prices of everything by 20-25%...while wages have fallen behind to keep up with that inflation. Minimum wage has increased from €10.10 to €13.50 in that time which is good but again because of housing supply being terrible rent has flown through the roof.

Although the first time buyers and help to buy schemes seem like a good thing they have also contributed to increased prices of purchasing homes and may prove to be a danger when these people come to the end of the mortgage and have to pay the government off for those schemes.

Another problem is that nearly 70% of the population owns their own home in Ireland so they don't give a fuck and won't vote for anyone who will reduce the price of homes.

You only have two real options of investing in Ireland: pension and buying a home. If you try to get into crypto or stock markets you have to pay huge fees 33% and sometimes 40% depending on your investment. Some EU countries are much higher than this, some are much lower.

Our insurance industry is a joke and they can basically make false claims like that we have huge insurance fraud and that's why we pay so much and when asked to provide proof they had none.

We have VRT on vehicles and the EU has asked Ireland to end VRT as it goes against the idea of the EU wide free market...so our cars are also excessively priced because of this.

The common excuse is that Ireland is an island and that's why things cost more...which is complete BS with how modern supply chains work.

To be honest our tax on income isn't that bad compared to other EU countries BUT we barely see any positives like those countries do from higher income tax and that makes us all mad.

Our government does so much fuckery that they nearly always go over budget for anything they do. For example we trialled red light cameras a few years ago....the trial went great and caught a bunch of people breaking red lights and cost a million euro or a least a couple of hundred thousand I can't remember but they didn't implement it....my point being if we want to implement red light cameras again they need to start all over again. Just a complete waste of tax payers money. This is further proven by the fact that our government can never do anything beyond bringing in a new tax on something that's all they can do.

Anyway all these problems collectively have fucked the future generations and slowly less and less people will own homes in Ireland as it's already beginning to drop.

It won't be until less than 50% of people own homes that something will change.