The Rooms We Cannot Leave

Of the 163,433 vacant dwellings recorded in Ireland, more than 27,000 — roughly one in six — are empty for a single reason.

The owner died.

In the middle of a housing crisis, twenty-seven thousand houses stand still because nobody in the family can face the alternative. That is not a policy failure or a market inefficiency. It is grief, expressed as an empty building, at national scale.

It is also the clearest evidence I can offer that our relationship with houses is not primarily financial. We talk about property in the language of assets and yields, and then we behave in ways that make no sense at all in those terms.

What the research actually shows

There is a substantial literature here, and it starts with a study that should be far better known.

In the early 1960s, the American sociologist Marc Fried studied residents displaced from Boston's West End by slum clearance. His paper, published in 1966, was called Grieving for a Lost Home — and the title was not a metaphor. Of the 473 women interviewed, 46% showed severe grief reactions: the same symptoms clinicians recognise after a bereavement.

They had, in many cases, been moved to objectively better accommodation. It did not help. What they had lost was not square footage.

The field Fried helped open is called place attachment, formalised by Setha Low and Irwin Altman in 1992 and reviewed comprehensively by Maria Lewicka in 2011, covering forty years of research. Scannell and Gifford's 2010 model breaks it into three parts: the person who attaches, the place they attach to, and the processes — emotional, cognitive, behavioural — by which it happens.

The useful takeaway is that attachment is not sentimentality. It is measurable, it predicts wellbeing, and disrupting it has consequences.

Maria Lewicka, who wrote the definitive review of the field.

Ontological security, which is the idea that unlocks it

The concept that best explains why housing insecurity hurts so specifically comes from sociology by way of Anthony Giddens: ontological security. The confidence that the world will continue to be roughly as you expect it to be tomorrow.

Dupuis and Thorns set out, in 1998, four conditions under which a home provides it. A home offers ontological security when it is a site of constancy; when it allows day-to-day routine free from surveillance; when it is a space where people feel in control, in contrast to elsewhere; and when it provides a secure base for identity construction.

Read those four and then think about a twelve-month lease.

Constancy: absent. Freedom from surveillance: partial, given inspections and the landlord's right of entry. Control: you cannot paint a wall. A secure base for identity: contingent on somebody else's investment decisions.

This is why "just rent, it's fine, it's normal in Germany" misses the point. It can be fine — where tenure is long and secure. The housing scholars Hulse and Milligan named the thing that actually matters in 2014, and it is not ownership. It is secure occupancy. Byrne and McArdle applied the framework to Ireland in 2022.

The Irish numbers, which are genuinely startling

Ireland is an outlier, and the scale of it is not widely appreciated.

Eurostat's 2025 figures show 92.6% of Irish 20–24 year olds living with their parents, against an EU average of 74.2%. For 25–29 year olds, 56.4% in Ireland against 41.8% across the Union.

The trend is the striking part. The EU average has barely moved since 2009. Ireland's figure has roughly doubled.

The CSO's own analysis, published in May 2024, adds the human register: more than 440,000 adults aged 18 to 34 living in the family home — 41% of that age group. 88% would prefer to move out.

And the finding that says most about what a home actually does: 52% felt their parents would not treat them as an adult until they did.

That is Dupuis and Thorns's fourth condition, failing, in a national statistic. A secure base for identity construction. You cannot fully become a separate person in a room where you were a child.

Meanwhile Census 2022 records the age at which more than half of householders own their home rising from 26 in 1991 to 36 in 2022. Home ownership has fallen to 66%. Average weekly private rent reached €273, up 37% in six years.

The situation from outside — a German documentary crew in Dublin.

What renters do anyway

The most humane research in this area is by Soaita and McKee, published in Geoforum in 2019, on what they call home-assembling — the work renters do to make an impermanent place feel like theirs.

It is not decorating in the magazine sense. It is the lamp that comes to every flat. The particular arrangement of objects on a shelf, reassembled identically in four cities. Photographs taped up because you cannot drill. Cooking a specific thing on a specific night. Rugs, because you cannot change the floor.

These read as small compromises. The research suggests they are something more purposeful: the active construction of continuity by people who have been denied the structural kind. If you cannot have constancy of place, you manufacture constancy of arrangement, and carry it with you.

Which reframes a lot of Irish rental life. The person with an absurd number of houseplants in a flat they may leave in a year is not being impractical. They are doing something the research says works.

On the psychology of attachment to objects.

The case against attachment

It would be dishonest to present attachment as straightforwardly good, because there is decent evidence that it can trap people.

A study by White and colleagues published in Frontiers in 2025, with a sample of 11,607, examined how attachment keeps older people in housing that no longer suits them — too large, too cold, too far up the stairs, too far from help. The attachment is real and so is the harm.

At the clinical end, hoarding disorder — a pathological version of the same impulse to keep and to hold — has an estimated prevalence of around 2.5%.

And attachment has a politics. A country where houses are freighted with this much meaning is a country where it is very hard to build anything near anyone. The same feeling that makes a home a home makes a planning objection.

The Irish house that nobody lives in

Which returns us to those 27,000 houses.

There is a specifically Irish version of attachment that has to do with leaving. The house kept for someone who emigrated. The place that stays furnished because selling it would settle a question the family has not settled. Anyone from a small place in Ireland knows a house like this, and knows better than to ask about it directly.

The vacancy statistic is usually deployed as an argument — proof of dysfunction, evidence for a tax. Both arguments have merit. But it is worth registering what the number actually is before using it: a very large quantity of grief, held in the form of buildings, by people who are not ready.

Houses in Ireland carry weight. That is the thing that makes the housing crisis hurt in the particular way it does, and it is the thing that makes it so hard to fix.

What this means for how you live

If the research says one useful thing to someone in an insecure home, it is this: the attachment is not conditional on the deeds.

Fried's West End residents grieved for tenement flats. Attachment attaches to the specific and the sensory — light at a particular hour, a route to a shop, the sound of a particular street — not to legal title. You are not being foolish for loving somewhere you do not own, and you are not obliged to hold back.

The corollary is that if you are unhappy where you live, "I should be grateful to have somewhere" is not the whole of it. The conditions that make a place feel like a home are describable — constancy, privacy, control, room to become yourself — and if several of them are missing, the discomfort is legitimate and it has a literature behind it.

A note on the sourcing

Irish figures are from the CSO's Census 2022 and its subsequent analyses, and from Eurostat. The academic work is cited by author and year and was checked against the original papers rather than secondary coverage.

Two limits. The emigration section rests on cultural observation rather than research — we could not stand up the standard scholarly references in this pass, so it is offered as observation and labelled as such. And the vacancy figure counts dwellings recorded as vacant because the owner died; it does not tell us how long they stay that way.

If your housing situation is affecting your mental health, that is worth raising with your GP. Threshold provides free advice to renters in Ireland. Videos are shown via YouTube's official embed and remain the property of their creators.