When Martin Leahy received an eviction notice in 2022 he found himself tumbling into Ireland’s housing crisis – where nothing was affordable.
The musician had moved to the west Cork village of Ballinadee a decade earlier to live cheaply, but even in this remote area rents had rocketed.
Leahy channelled his anxiety into writing a song – Everyone Should Have a Home – then took a bus to Dublin, walked to the gates of parliament, unpacked his guitar and sang it.
The next week Leahy made another trek to the capital and performed the song again in an hour-long loop outside the Dáil. The week after that he did it again, and again, and again, every Thursday at 1pm.
Two years later the 48-year-old has passed his 100th performance and finds himself the bard of Ireland’s cry for affordable housing.
The one-time backing musician, who had written only a handful of songs before his housing anthem, has made headlines and acquired a social media following – a stumble into fame as the guy who gave the crisis a soundtrack, and doesn’t give up.
“There was no real plan. I didn’t know what to do with the song. It was an act of desperation,” Leahy said recently, fresh off the bus for another stint outside parliament. “I’d never been to the Dáil before or engaged in political activism. This is all new to me. It’s weird.”
Leahy is low-key, even shy, and he found his first performance on Kildare Street “nerve-racking”. In contrast to his soft-spoken nature, the song is a plaintive, angry denunciation of an economic and political system that enriches property owners and punishes the rest.
“Everyone should have a home, in this world, in this life, it’s a basic human right, to have a dignified place you call your own,” goes the chorus. “Safe and warm where you belong, everyone should have a home.”
Catchy and direct, it struck a chord with passersby who recorded and uploaded clips a few weeks into Leahy’s solitary performances. Word spread, interviews followed and Leahy became a new voice for an issue that affects swathes of society and could oust Ireland’s centre-right government in an election due within a year.
Schoolteachers leading class tours to the Dáil have paused at the gates and told their students to listen to Leahy’s lyrics. “They said what was happening here was just as important as what was happening inside,” he said.
Leahy’s persistence reflects the intractable shortage of affordable homes, a consequence of the Celtic tiger crash, warped financial incentives, population growth, interest rates and construction bottlenecks, among other factors.
There are more than 18,000 houses to rent on Airbnb versus just 2,000 on Daft.ie, Ireland’s main property search site, according to Lorcan Sirr, who lectures in housing at Technological University Dublin. Rents have doubled since 2013 and are near the top of global league tables. Nearly a third of new tenancies have a rent ofmore than €2,000 a month.
The number of homeless people has spiralled. Last month there was widespread mourning for Ann Delaney, a former nurse found dead in a sleeping bag on a pavement not far from parliament.
This has coincided with an unprecedented influx of refugees from Ukraine and other countries that has filled accommodation centres and hotels, fuelling a nativist narrative about foreigners swamping Ireland. Rioters in Dublin last October chanted “Ireland is full”. Policy failures have created an opening for xenophobes, said Leahy. “The government has created a gap for the far right to fill.”
The accidental troubadour of the crisis has enjoyed some unexpected luck. The eviction order that prompted his song has been suspended, allowing him to remain in his home in Ballinadee, albeit in limbo, with the risk of a renewed eviction order. “Living in a state of anxiety that affects your whole being feels so unnecessary and unfair,” he said.
Talks with academics, activists and politicians have made Leahy aware that many of Ireland’s property travails are replicated across Europe. A conversation with an Irish ruling party legislator did not leave him optimistic about the crisis. “He told me to keep protesting,” Leahy recalled. “I guess that means he doesn’t have a plan to fix it.”
