On April 1, amid a protracted housing crisis that has been steadily mounting in scale and intensity, the Irish government lifted an eviction ban that had protected tenants since last October. As the current housing minister Darragh O’Brien conceded, the predictable outcome will be a rise in already record-breaking levels of homelessness.

Whatever way you look at this hydra-headed housing crisis (which seems increasingly unmanageable for the ruling parties), it has produced catastrophic effects for the country’s residents, particularly in urban areas. Emergency accommodation houses 11,988 people, with others sequestered away in more hidden forms of homelessness. Those who wish to buy will see that house prices are now seven times the median income.

But we can find the most striking symptoms of the crisis in the private rental sector, as is the case in many other countries. One day last August, only 716 homes were available to rent in the south of Ireland, and rents stood at an all-time high. Even mainstream liberal commentators detect unmistakable signs that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have “decided to bring back nineteenth-century landlordism, to reshape Ireland as a nation beholden to private property owners.”