DUBLIN: Every week Martin Leahy, a musician recently evicted from his rental accommodation, stands outside the Irish parliament and sings an angry protest song, "Everyone Should Have a Home!"
Leahy's plight is a fragment of intractable housing and homelessness crises that have dominated election campaigning as Ireland prepares to vote on November 29.
"I'm now a member of Ireland's hidden homeless," Leahy told AFP during a break from belting out his composition on loop for an hour, pausing only to chat to passers-by.
The 48-year-old guitarist had to leave his long-term rental accommodation in the southern city of Cork this month after his landlord sold the property.
Now staying with a friend, he is pessimistic about his future.
"There is a lack of availability and rents are too high, I'm priced out of the market," said Leahy, who carries a placard reading "#HousingCrisis" along with his instrument.
Softly spoken but determined, Leahy has travelled from Cork to the parliament every Thursday – a protest pilgrimage he hopes is hitting home in the corridors of power.
"Irish people should not accept this as being a normal part of life here," he said.
Successive Irish governments have failed to fix the EU member's chronic housing shortage.
According to a Central Bank of Ireland report in September, a supply shortfall has built up over a decade as construction lagged behind demand.
With Ireland's population of 5.4 million, swollen by surging net inward migration, growing four times faster than the rate of new house building, around 52,000 new homes a year are needed to meet pent-up demand – way above current construction.
Official data indicates the government will miss its modest affordable and social housing targets for 2024.
Ireland's prime minister Simon Harris was heckled about housing while campaigning last week in Dublin, and revelations from a former minister that the issue was not a priority proved embarrassing.
Harris's centre-right Fine Gael party has been in power since 2010 and while currently leading in opinion polls, the gap between it and the largest opposition party, the centre-left Sinn Fein – whose main attack line is on housing – is narrowing.
Government critics blame it for slow reform of a cumbersome planning system and not sufficiently regulating the short-term lettings sector or the investment funds that buy up more new apartments than individuals and families.
According to the EU statistical body Eurostat, housing costs swallow more than 50 percent of income in Ireland on the back of fast-growing rents that soared by 68 percent between 2010 and 2021.
The Irish capital is now regularly ranked in surveys as among the EU's most expensive, with housing prices hitting young adults particularly hard, creating a generational divide.
Around two-thirds of people aged 25 to 29 in Ireland still live with their parents, well above the EU average of around 42 percent.
Queues of applicants outside homes for sale and flats to let when they come on the market are commonplace. Many Irish city centres are also pockmarked by run-down buildings.
"Thousands of vacant properties hoarded by owners in the middle of a housing crisis could be repurposed as accommodation," said Frank O'Connor, who runs Derelict Ireland, a lobby group.
"This is 'Generation locked out' – many people feel poor even though they are living in a wealthy country, on paper," said Tony Groves, a left-leaning commentator.
Ireland is the second-richest country in the EU after Luxembourg based on GDP per capita, a far cry from the 1980s when the country was scourged by sky-high unemployment and emigration.
"But back then housing costs never exceeded 20 to 30 percent of income," Groves told AFP.
At the coalface of the crisis, homelessness hit a record high last month of almost 15,000 people, including around 4,000 children.
Wes Fay, who runs the Mendicity shelter in inner-city Dublin, said the city had seen a doubling in numbers during his eight years working in the sector.
"You have to be brutally honest with people who come in looking for housing, I tell them you will not be housed by the Irish government," said Fay, 53, after serving daily lunches.
Standing beside a mural in Dublin that aims to highlight homelessness, Conor Culkin of the rights group Focus Ireland said "the public feel a deep shame about this sheer amount of homeless, particularly children."
"Many people will be thinking about that when they vote," he said.