David McWilliams

speaker

15,996 appearances 46 recordings 8 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 6d ago

David McWilliams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 46 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.

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The David McWilliams Podcast · Ireland's Immigration Numbers Don't Add Up And Housing Is Paying the Price · 1 Sep 2026 podcast

But the obligation is on the present administration to get it right, to take decisions that aren't hard, but that are commonsensical about the amount of people that should come into the country.

Yeah, well, just if you could imagine having an equation in your head.

So housing demand, right, equals the natural increase in the population, which is, we said about 20,000.

That is basically births minus deaths in every year, plus immigration.

That's the new people coming in.

divided by the average household size, and then plus what we call obsolescence.

So the average household size in Ireland, which is the amount of people, and again, I'll explain this.

When we were kids, there was like five kids in one house or seven kids in one house, right?

That has collapsed.

So the size of Irish households

has collapsed almost to the European average.

In the 2022 census, it was 2.74 people live in every home in Ireland.

European average is 2.3 people live in every home.

So we're moving down that way.

As that figure falls, the implication is you have to build more houses for every 10 citizens.

That's the key.

So in the old days, if you had one house with 10 people living in it,

Now you have one house with two people living in it.

This means for every 10 people, you need five houses.

So that's a big, significant figure, right?

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