How Much of Ireland’s Social Housing List Is Non-Irish? What the Numbers Actually Say

At a recent Kerry County Council meeting, councillors said they keep meeting constituents who have read online that most social housing is now going to non-Irish people. The councillors asked the council to start recording the nationalities of those allocated housing — not to fuel the claim, but to be able to rebut it, because right now they lack the data to argue either way. The claim that “most” social housing goes to non-Irish people is false. But the honest answer is more interesting than the rumour, and the State has left a gap where a clear figure should be. Here is what the official data does and does not show.

The headline figure: 27.9%, not “most”

The best official source is the Summary of Social Housing Assessments (SSHA), a statutory count the Housing Agency and the local authorities run each year. It is a point-in-time snapshot of every household assessed as qualified for social housing support whose need is not yet being met — in plain terms, the national waiting list. The 2024 assessment was taken on 4 November 2024.

So the viral framing is wrong by a wide margin. Non-Irish applicants are not “most” of the list; they are a bit over a quarter of it. Anyone repeating the “majority” line is repeating something the State’s own count contradicts. That is worth saying first, because a case built on a false number collapses the moment someone opens the report.

The real story: more than double their share of the population

Forget “majority.” The number that should actually stop you is the comparison with population. Non-Irish citizens are roughly 12% of the people living in Ireland (Census 2022). Yet they head 27.9% of the social housing waiting list. That is more than double their share of the population — a group that is one-eighth of the country occupying better than one-quarter of the queue for State housing. This is not a rounding error or a marginal over-count; it is a structural over-representation of more than two to one, and it is the single most important figure in the entire debate.

Both things are true at once, and saying so is what makes the case credible: non-Irish applicants are not a majority of the list — and they sit on it at more than twice the rate you would expect from their numbers in the population. The people screaming “most” are wrong, and so are the people insisting there is “nothing to see here.” A 2-to-1 over-representation in access to a scarce, taxpayer-funded resource is exactly the kind of thing a functioning country measures and explains in public.

And the non-EU cohort is rising at a stunning rate

The over-representation is dramatic. The trend is the part that should genuinely alarm anyone planning the housing system — and you do not need to reach back years to see it. It is in a single year of the State’s own data. Between the 2023 and 2024 assessments, the number of households on the list headed by a non-EEA citizen rose from 5,631 to 7,282 — an increase of 1,651 households, or 29.3%, in twelve months. Within that, households with refugee status jumped 50.7% in the same single year, from 1,291 to 1,946.

Now look at what was happening to everyone else on that list at the same time. The number of Irish main applicants fell by 628 (−1.4%), and EEA applicants fell slightly too. The list grew by 1,117 households overall — but Irish households declined. In other words, the entire net growth of Ireland’s social housing waiting list in 2024 came from non-Irish households, and the single biggest driver was the non-EU cohort. Irish demand on the list did not rise; it shrank. Every bit of the increase, and then some, was non-Irish.

That is the crux, and it is worth stating plainly: the list is not simply growing under general pressure that hits everyone equally. It is recomposing. A waiting list that grows almost 2% while its Irish share falls and its non-EU share climbs nearly 30% in one year is telling you something specific about who the scarce supply is increasingly being assessed for. And this is the slope of a single year — the Housing Agency confirms the non-Irish share is up significantly on 2021 as well. That is a legitimate thing for citizens to ask about, and a damning thing for the State to leave unexplained.

And in the cities, higher still

The 27.9% is a national average, and the same SSHA report breaks it down by local authority (Table A1.9). The councillors who started this row were in Kerry — and Kerry sits almost exactly on the national figure, with 652 of its 2,332 listed households (28.0%) headed by a non-Irish applicant. So the “most are foreign” rumour is false even in the county where it was loudest; but “more than a quarter” is the real local answer, and that is not nothing. The cities run higher again:

• Dublin City — 35.5% non-Irish (4,505 of 12,682 households): over a third of the capital’s list.
• Galway City — 31.8% (618 of 1,942).
• South Dublin — 29.3% (1,094 of 3,728).
• Kerry — 28.0% (652 of 2,332), and Fingal — 25.5% (1,524 of 5,980).

This is why a national headline alone is misleading in both directions: it is high enough everywhere to be a real feature of the system, and high enough in the cities — where housing is scarcest and the queues longest — to be a genuine pressure point. A councillor fielding the question at a clinic in Dublin is dealing with a one-in-three reality, not the national one-in-four.

What the figure is — and what it is not

Precision matters here, because the categories get blurred in the retelling. Three things are routinely confused:

• The waiting list (the 27.9% figure) is the count of qualified, unmet need — people approved and waiting. It is not the same as who actually got a house this year.
• Allocations — who was housed in a given year — are not broken down by nationality in any routine national publication. That is the number the Kerry councillors are actually asking for, and it does not currently exist in usable form.
• Eligibility is already restricted. People in the International Protection (asylum) process living in IPAS accommodation are not eligible for social housing, and neither is anyone unlawfully resident. The waiting list does not include them.

So the 27.9% is the cleanest national figure available, but it answers “who is on the list”, not “who is being housed.” The fact that the second question can’t be answered from published data is the core problem.

The real policy lever: the residence threshold

How does a recently arrived migrant become eligible at all? Through the habitual residence condition. On The Claire Byrne Show, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín put the threshold in international context: a person can satisfy habitual residence in Ireland after roughly 52 weeks, whereas, he said, “Austria would have five years habitual residency, Sweden would have three years.” His argument is one of economics, not identity: “if you bring 70,000 people into a country every year and you don’t build the infrastructure for them,” he said, you push up rents and prices and lengthen every queue. A residence bar lower than the rest of Europe’s, on his account, becomes a pull factor that loads demand onto a system already short of supply. That — how long a connection to the State should be required before the queue even opens to you — is the substantive policy question, not whether eligible people should be housed.

It is worth stating the counter-point fairly, because it is also true. As Labour’s Conor Sheehan stressed on the same programme, the 52 weeks is “not the only box you have to tick”: an applicant must also have a long-term right to remain in the State and pass a means and need assessment, “a rigorous process,” and even then, getting onto the list “doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily ever going to get an allocation.” Nobody is being waved past the rules. The honest critique is not that the gate is unguarded — it is that the gate opens sooner here than almost anywhere in Europe, and the State does not publish what comes through it.

This is also live legislation. The Housing and Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026, brought by Housing Minister James Browne in June 2026, puts lawful residence and a habitual-residence test on a statutory footing for the first time. It sets different residence rules for Irish, UK, EU/EEA and non-EU nationals, and confirms that people on temporary permissions — including Ukrainians under the EU Temporary Protection Directive — are not treated as habitually resident for social housing. The Minister’s own framing is telling: he says the Bill will have “little material effect” on numbers because it largely codifies existing practice. If that is right, then the threshold debate Tóibín raises is the one that would actually change outcomes — and it is barely being had.

Transparency versus the fear of abuse

The Kerry councillors’ request — record and publish the nationalities of those allocated housing — split the debate cleanly. Kerry councillor Marie Maloney’s case was simple: she wants the data because, faced with the rumours online, “I can’t defend what I don’t know.” Labour’s housing spokesperson Conor Sheehan argued against publication: everyone allocated a home has already been deemed eligible, so releasing their country of origin serves no purpose, and in a town the size of Killarney — population under 20,000 — named nationalities could make individuals “easily identifiable,” risking the “disgusting” racist abuse his party’s by-election candidate Helen Ogbu faced. Tóibín took the opposite view: “misinformation excels in the petri dish of a vacuum of information,” and hiding figures “only pushes [people] towards the ne’er-do-wells who do want to push a racist agenda.”

The live exchange proved the stakes better than either politician could. Mid-discussion a listener, Kathy, texted in to insist the rumour was simply true — “a large proportion of social housing is going to new arrivals above citizens… on lists for years” — a claim the conversation had just shown the data does not support. That is the whole problem in one message: in the absence of a published figure, the false version wins by default. Both politicians have a point worth holding together — Sheehan is right that data can be weaponised and that eligibility is already earned; Tóibín is right that secrecy is what lets the rumour run unchecked. The resolution is not to choose between transparency and dignity, but to publish aggregate data — counts by category, never individuals — which arms the councillors with an answer without exposing a single tenant.

The ask

This site’s position is narrow and concrete. The Department of Housing and the local authorities should publish, annually and in accessible form:

• Social housing allocations each year by main-applicant nationality category (Irish, UK, EU/EEA, non-EEA), alongside the waiting-list breakdown that SSHA already produces.
• The same allocation data by local authority, so regional patterns — the ones constituents actually ask councillors about — can be seen rather than guessed.
• Year-on-year series, so the trend the SSHA hints at (the near-doubling of non-EEA households since 2021) can be tracked openly rather than surfacing only through parliamentary questions.

None of that names an individual or collects anything new about a tenant; it reports against categories the system already records at assessment. A government confident its housing allocation is fair has no reason to withhold the figures that would prove it — and publishing them is the surest way to kill the “most social housing goes to foreigners” rumour stone dead. As the Kerry councillors understood, the data is not the enemy of a calm debate. The vacuum is.

And the data is forceable. Every local authority and the Housing Agency are public bodies under the Freedom of Information Act 2014: a request for aggregate allocation counts by nationality category — counts only, no individuals — is a legitimate FOI, and where the figures sit in an electronic system the body can be obliged to extract them. A Parliamentary Question to the Minister for Housing is faster still and costs the asker nothing. It can be done, and it has been done elsewhere — the Northern Ireland Housing Executive already publishes social housing allocations broken down by nationality. There is no good reason the Republic cannot.

Sources

• The Housing Agency, Summary of Social Housing Assessments 2024 (first published April 2025). All nationality figures from Table 2.9, “Citizenship (main applicant)” (p. 41); local-authority figures from Table A1.9, “Citizenship (main applicant) by Local Authority” (p. 52); total list and count date from the Executive Summary (pp. 9–10). Publication page.
• Newstalk — Labour fears ‘disgusting’ abuse if social housing residents’ nationalities are published (16 June 2026)
• The Claire Byrne Show, Newstalk — “Kerry councillors seek nationalities of people allocated social housing” (broadcast 16 June 2026). Direct quotes from Conor Sheehan TD (Labour) and Peadar Tóibín TD (Aontú) are taken from the broadcast audio.
• The Journal — Social housing applicants will have to prove they are legally resident (Housing & Residential Tenancies (Misc. Provisions) Bill 2026)
• CSO — Census 2022 Profile 5: citizenship and population by nationality
• Gript — Almost 30% of housing waiting list are non-nationals (2021–2024 comparison)
• Remigration Ireland — Ireland’s activation schemes and the data the State won’t publish

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