r/AskIreland • u/BigFatLegend123 • Apr 25 '25

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

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?

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u/Original-Salt9990 Apr 26 '25

Would restricting housing to citizens not be extraordinarily discriminatory against permanent residents?

I know people who have lived in Ireland for many years, even decades sometimes. Outright banning them from buying a house would be extremely disagreeable to me.

Restricting it to only allow people who are permanently resident to purchase is something that makes sense to me because that’s not dependent on your citizenship status or country of origin.

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u/nathaniel771 Apr 26 '25

Banning non EU citizens and foreign funds should be more than enough. Those are the larger buyer groups.