In the now decade of the grand coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, they have managed to accomplish a lot. Breaking records in housing stock (least available long-term lets in the history of the state), in housing prices (highest rents in the history of the state), and evictions (more than during the Famine!). And that's not even to mention their zealous investment in our time-honoured national traditions (driving young people to emigrate en masse). But perhaps my favourite of their inventions is a political manoeuvre I like to call the five-in-one scheme. It's a nice little trick, one that passes over most people unnoticed. You see, the five-in-one scheme is the strategy through which FFG announce all solutions to the various crises we face today.
The first time I noticed this pattern was with an issue which directly impacted my life: the rollout of the free contraception scheme for 17–25 year olds (I do wonder how this was decided as the age range, but that is a question for another essay). It was first announced in the Programme for Government in 2020. Then again, in 2021, it was announced that the Government would be launching a scheme for free contraception for 17–25 year olds. Hurrah! rang out the praise across the country, once more, for the Government finally doing something for young women. But then came autumn and budget time and another year's delay. Finally, in 2022, came the budget. What was announced once more? You may be able to guess: FREE CONTRACEPTION FOR 17–25 YEAR OLDS!
The government has since expanded the scheme to include 26 year olds, then 30 year olds, then 31 year olds, then 35 year olds. The staggered expansion has provided half a decade of credit to the government for implementing basically the same policy. This is not to deny the scheme's beneficial impact, but to point out that the government has been able to get away with accomplishing one thing for years on end, strategically presenting itself as providing new public services — and having it reported as such — when in most other countries this rollout would be widely viewed as a time-wasting disaster. Yet for FFG, it's five schemes in one.
Sheds for all
This brings us to the Government's latest five-in-one. Modular homes, or granny flats — or really sheds with a few functional light bulbs and perhaps a bathroom — were first floated in early 2025 as a way to facilitate a more comfortable form of intergenerational living. This was proposed as a planning exemption for those with enough capital to shift one's 30-something children into a ramshackle structure in the back garden, but not enough to float them a housing deposit. Or, as discussed on Ireland AM, a place you could shove the parents into when the grown-up kids start having babies of their own.
There was an almost immediate backlash. First, if planning permission is to be waived, what exactly is forcing people to make these sheds actually liveable? The purpose of building standards isn't to drive up costs: it's to guarantee basic standards of living. No one wants to go back to the tenement houses that clogged up the inner city and saw whole families in single rooms (although some of our nation's most industrious landlords are certainly trying). Throughout 2025, public consultations were held, and the government gave in: no planning exemptions for garden rooms, but for "liveable dwellings". Isn't that a relief! But another shift then emerged, one of much more concern to the public at large. In March 2026 it was announced that these structures could be eligible for the Rent-a-Room scheme.
For those unfamiliar with this most unpleasant sector of the Irish private rental market, the Rent-a-Room scheme is a programme to encourage homeowners to become digs landlords. Digs are a form of rental arrangement classified as a licensee agreement — a form of lease that provides tenants with no enforceable legal recourse against their landlord and none of the rights provided in traditional tenancies. Say goodbye to a rent book, to 24-hour notice before your room is accessed, to your deposit back, and to anything formal, really. In fact, most of these situations operate with no written agreement beyond a Revolut transfer every couple of weeks. In the not-too-distant past, this type of arrangement was compensated for by much lower than market-level rents: when my mother was living in Galway in the late 1990s, her digs cost £50 a month.
But now, under the Rent-a-Room scheme, you can collect up to €14,000 per year completely tax-free! And what does this incentivise? Charging €14,000 a year (approximately €1,150 per month) in rent to your poor unsuspecting tenants, who often have no kitchen or amenities of their own. In one of my stints in digs, we had a hot plate, an old wine fridge, and a single cupboard between the two of us.
Take a look at Daft.ie, Rent.ie, or any of the many Facebook letting groups, and you will see that these licensee rooms go for just about the same rate as any traditional house share. This reality — hard to parse for those not living through it — is that there is almost no correlation between the size, location, or amenities of a rental and its cost. Most rooms across the greater Dublin commuter area go for €800–€1,200 a month, regardless of location or proximity to public transport. Since the announcement of including modular homes in the Rent-a-Room scheme, interest in building has reportedly gone up 400%. And why not? The costs will pay themselves back tax-free in under five years.
The mental stranglehold of neoliberal economics
These policies have found strong advocates in the form of Progress Ireland — a think tank partly funded by billionaire Stripe co-founder John Collison and inspired by Ezra Klein's "abundance" ideology. Collaboration with billionaire-backed astroturf organisations will only continue to produce "solutions" like this, as the government persistently sidesteps much-needed improvements to existing public housing and restricts the delivery of new public housing to so-called "cost rentals" at over 40% of a minimum-wage worker's take-home pay.
According to government arguments, this increase in supply will drive down rent prices. But how exactly is that possible when you have laid out a tax break that specifically invites people to charge upwards of a grand a month to slum it in your back garden? Yet again, we are seeing not a solution to the housing crisis, but a government-sponsored transfer of wealth to those who already own homes in this unfair system. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's commitment to neoliberal economics has a mental stranglehold on our public response to this crisis.
In the first decades of the Free State, when our nation was still an agrarian backwater, we moved thousands out of tenements into newly built public housing in Ballyfermot and Cabra. Now all the public imagination can muster is a bleak future where we, the countless renters of Ireland's generational underclass, will shell out most of our salaries to live in a kitchen-less box, making sure to keep quiet as we slip past our neo-colonial overlords' mansion houses on the way to our hovels — and see it celebrated on the morning television shows. Not that we have a sitting room to watch them in, anyway.
Aoife Kilbane McGowan is a Dublin-based writer and podcaster. She publishes a regular blog on Irish politics and youth issues at aoifekilbanemcgowan.substack.com. She also hosts Left Out, a weekly news and political commentary podcast with Jenny Maguire.