“This is the first example in northern Europe of a left-populist party really managing to capture the discontent of younger renters,” said Ben Ansell, a professor at Oxford University who has studied links between the housing market and populism. 

Ireland’s housing crisis has its roots in the financial crash of 2008, which devastated the country’s economy and stopped virtually all new building projects in their tracks.  People’s wages eventually recovered, but home prices exploded, soaring by 90 percent in Dublin since 2012.  That pushed more and more people into the private rental market. 

Strict new rules on mortgage lending, widely embraced as needed protection from another financial crisis, are one factor limiting people’s housing options.  Another is the government’s decision to rely on what critics deride as market-based responses to the housing shortage, rather than building new public housing. 

Soaring rents — driven even higher, critics say, by a misguided subsidy system — are taking ever larger chunks out of young people’s wages, making it all but impossible for them to save for a down payment on a house.  And because Ireland has long treated renting as little more than a stopgap before people inevitably buy homes, its weak tenant protections allow landlords to evict renters almost at will. 

Brian McLoughlin, the head of communications for Inner City Helping Homeless in Dublin, said the group had seen an explosion of families seeking help in recent years after being evicted by landlords.  Often, the government houses them in hotel rooms, where the conditions can be severely cramped.