With as few as eight of Ireland’s national politicians living in private rental accommodation, the proportion of TDs and Senators who are renting is significantly lower than among the population as a whole.

The plight of renters in Ireland is one of the issues at the forefront of the debate over the housing crisis.

The opposition has attacked successive governments for not stemming spiralling rents, which have exceeded an average of €2,000 per month around the country for the first time in 2025.

The current Coalition has announced reforms aimed at boosting private investment to build more housing in the hope that this will bring down rents.

At the same time it is seeking to strengthen tenant protections with a new national system of rent controls and better security of tenure.

Just five TDs and three Senators confirmed they are renters in response to a survey carried out by The Irish Times in recent weeks.

The TDs are Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin, Fine Gael’s Barry Ward and Kiera Keogh, along with Sinéad Gibney and Eoin Hayes of the Social Democrats.

The Senators who confirmed they are renting are Laura Harmon of the Labour Party and Anne Rabbitte and Shane Curley of Fianna Fáil.

Some others, such as Minister for Housing James Browne and Social Democrats housing spokesman Rory Hearne, own their own homes but confirmed they had been renters for several years.

In addition to being renters, both Ward and Gibney are landlords, with one property each.

They are two of about 30 landlords among TDs and Senators who indicated they have residential properties in Dáil and Seanad register-of-interests declarations.

It would seem that landlords outnumber renters by some distance among the politicians in Leinster House.

The eight politicians who rent represent 11 per cent – little more than one in 10 – of the 74 Oireachtas members who responded to the survey.

The remainder of the 234 Oireachtas members did not answer the survey, so the precise proportion of renters in Leinster House has not necessarily been revealed.

The eight confirmed renters represents just 3 per cent of the overall number of TDs and Senators.

Whether the true proportion of renters in Leinster House is closer to 11 per cent or 3 per cent, it is still well below the rate of people living in rental accommodation in Ireland.

The proportion of tenants in the private rental sector in the population generally is about one in five or 20 per cent.

So, what are the reasons for the low number of renters in Leinster House?

For one thing, the age profile in Leinster House tends to be older than the general population – by about 10 years at the start of the last Dáil, when the average age of TDs was 48.5.

Ó Broin says younger people are more likely to rent.

He also cites those with a modest income; renters where the head of household was born outside of Ireland; and people who owned a home but now rent as a result of relationship breakdown or mortgage distress, as other groups among tenants in the private rental sector.

“In some senses the Oireachtas isn’t representative of the population as a whole so its tenure breakdown probably isn’t representative either,” says Ó Broin, who notes that people in the Oireachtas “have significantly higher incomes”.

He also says “any politician who’s doing their constituency work properly will engage with large numbers of people in different types of housing situations [including renters]” while adding: “of course the more representative your parliament is of people’s real life experiences, I think, the better.”

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Ó Broin, now 53, has been renting since he was 18 and has been living in his current home in Clondalkin for 15 years. He has greater security of tenure than many renters. His landlord is the Church of Ireland and the deeds of the property he lives in stipulate that it must not be sold.

He is aware that other renters are less secure. “I deal with lots of cases of people in their 50s and 60s who are renting and when circumstances change they’re in very precarious situations.”

He is critical of Government efforts to grow the private rental sector, saying “renting is volatile by its very nature” and, even with rent pressure zones, rents have risen faster than any income increases for most tenants in recent years.

Will he ever seek to buy?

“You wouldn’t get a mortgage at my age but also the insecurity of the employment [as a TD] is the other thing,” Ó Broin says. “Buying a house isn’t on my radar.”

Harmon, who is based in Cork, says she does hope to buy in the coming years but knows she is fortunate to have a tenancy where she is comfortable to be living.

“I do hope to own my own home one day,” she says, but it is “going to take me a couple of years before I’ll be in a position to even look at that”.

“I know that a lot of people are even struggling to find somewhere to rent and somewhere they can afford,” says Harmon, who is a board member of housing charity Threshold

She stood in the last general election on a platform of a “generation who are locked out of the housing market” and says three of her sisters have left the country over the cost of living. “They didn’t see home ownership in their future,” she says.

“A lot of renters do aspire to home ownership but unfortunately that dream is being taken away from them because of the absolute enormity of the cost of homes in this country.”

Ward and Gibney fall into a category that can perhaps best be described as accidental landlords.

Ward, a TD for Dún Laoghaire, says he was lucky enough to have been able to buy a property in Dublin city before the economic crash and it was his home. However, once he was elected to the Oireachtas, he felt he needed to be living in his constituency and he also got married and started a family.

“It wasn’t feasible to live in a one-bedroom apartment outside the constituency any more so we rent out of necessity.”

He also says that when he moved out of his property it was in negative equity and he couldn’t sell it “without saddling myself with a significant additional debt”. He rents out the apartment.

Ward, who also hopes to buy a house in the future, says his own experience of renting has been positive but that “doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of people who’ve had very negative experiences renting”.

He says he knows this from meeting constituents who may have “unscrupulous” landlords or be in “dire financial circumstances” and facing rent increases – an issue he says the Government is seeking to address.

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He also says: “I think the discussion around landlords in the Dáil can sometimes suggest to people that TDs and Senators are out of touch when in fact nothing could be farther from the truth.

“We are all in daily contact with people with different circumstances ... so we are very much aware of the pressures that people face around the country and around our constituencies in particular.”

Gibney, as TD for Dublin-Rathdown, also owns a property but says: “When I met and married my now husband our home was no longer appropriate for our blended family and so we now rent and I now rent out my home.”

One politician who is neither a homeowner nor a renter is Labour’s Eoghan Kenny, the youngest TD in the Dáil, who lives with his grandmother in Mallow, Co Cork.

The 25-year-old is not alone among people his age, with almost 70 per cent of them living at home.

The Cork North-Central TD says there’s a couple of reasons he’s living there. “Number one – it’s my home. I’ve lived there all my life”.

But another reason is a “lack of housing supply” and available rental accommodation in the town.

“I want to live in Mallow where my home base is and where my constituency office is. The only possible way I could live there is by living at home with my grandmother.”