A proposal to allow modular homes in back gardens without planning permission prompted a passionate debate on Liveline recently. Callers expressed a range of views; from those who felt the so-called 'beds in sheds' should not form part of the solution to the housing crisis, to those who were strongly in favour of them. Listen back to the full segment from Liveline segment above.
24-year-old Tommy from Kildare is still living at home with his parents. For him, the suggestion that younger people might move from a box room to a cabin in the garden is not a viable solution - it's just a lowering of standards, he says:
"I think young people in Ireland deserve better. Everyone should be given the equal and fair chance of actually getting home ownership. And I think this measure is simply not good enough. The government needs to go back to the drawing board and actually look at how they’re going to get young people to actually have home ownership."
Tommy’s spoke about the practical and psychological impacts of staying at home through his twenties: the stalled independence, the pressure to save, and the fear that renting just puts off the inevitable return to the family home:
"Realistically, I’m just going to run out of savings and then end up back at home, like a couple of my friends, and then you run out of savings and you’re just prolonging how long you have to stay at home for. It’s really not viable."
Living at home in Kildare means Tommy has a roof over his head, but he still has a long commute to work in Dublin. This has had a chilling effect on his social life and he describes how he's missed out on many nights out with friends and colleagues. Being time-poor it next to impossible for him to form intimate relationships and start to build an independent life of his own:
"There’s no real experience of what you would get in your 20s because of the housing crisis. It just has a knock-on effect on everything, especially when it comes to relationships and your social life. It’s just so draining on your mental health."
Some callers saw modular homes as a first step onto the housing ladder; but having listened to a range of views, Tommy expressed his frustration that younger people are being asked to settle for less:
"It feels like no one’s coming to save me when it comes to getting house. And it’s just all within my responsibility to figure it out myself. Even being told, ‘don’t emigrate, don’t emigrate, there’s hope, you can just live in this modular home’ I feel that is so insulting. We deserve actual housing."
Catherine broadened the discussion, arguing that any serious response to the crisis must think beyond temporary structures and address the infrastructure and planning choices that have led to the current situation:
"We should not be putting substandard sheds or wood cabins en masse. You transfer that into an urban are and the pressures would be unreal. When you talk about sewage, it’s not just a question of a pipes, it all has to go somewhere and be treated and If you go over that capacity, the whole thing is banjaxed."
Catherine also brought personal experience to the conversation, recalling a period of homelessness in London while pregnant and living with her partner in deeply inadequate accommodation. That experience shaped her anger at what she sees as a lack of care and a failure of ambition in Irish housing policy:
"I was in homeless accommodation in London with my partner waiting for our first child, and completely inadequate; a tiny little bedroom in a B&B, no cooking access at all. It was grim. So yeah, I know what it is to be in a terrible situation. We could do much better."
What emerged from the programme was not simply disagreement over modular homes, but a deeper unease about what counts as an acceptable answer to the long-running crisis. For Tommy, it symbolises a generation being asked to lower its expectations. For Catherine, it risks creating new forms of poor-quality housing under the banner of emergency action. Other callers spoke in favour of modular homes and some placed a share of the blame on a younger generation, and claimed that their expectations were too high. To hear the full segment, listen back above or listen back to Liveline on the RTÉ Radio Player app.