A community in trouble - Gaeltacht na nDéise's housing crisis is the 'biggest challenge they have faced ever'
Gaeltacht na nDéise may be the smallest Gaeltacht in the country, but the challenges its facing are anything but.
Gaeltachtaí across the country are experiencing a serious housing crisis, and the country's smallest Gaeltacht is no exception.
With roughly 1,500 daily Irish speakers living in the Waterford Gaeltachts of An Rinn and An Sean Phobal, a lack of affordable housing means a loss of everyday Irish speakers in Waterford, as families are forced to move to other areas without a community of Gaeilgeoirí around them.
The local community development organisation have been campaigning for more affordable housing in the area for years.
Míchéal Ó Drisleáin, manager of the local community development association in An Rinn, spoke to the Waterford News & Star about the ongoing crisis.
Waterford City and County Council have several housing initiatives underway in Gaeltacht na nDéise, they told this paper, however Míchéal says this isn't reflected in the area.
"To be honest, nothing is really happening," Míchéal told Waterford News and Star: "It's moving very, very slowly and you know, people want it to happen, but there's nothing really happening on the ground and it is definitely affecting the area."
Míchéal said there are two main challenges for locals looking to buy a home; the "huge" cost for houses in the area, and the lack of housing options.
He said: "You have people that are growing up now, in their twenties or thirties, that want to live here, but they can't afford it, number one, or number two, they actually can't buy houses because there aren't any houses there."
He said this has led to "a whole generation now that are almost being pushed out of the way" with many locals moving into Dungarvan and other places, which Míchéal says makes it "very difficult" for them to come back.
"That's a loss, you know, because that's the next generation," he continued, "they're the families that will have kids going to local school here and so on, so it is going to be a long-term impact when the housing isn't available for people. So it's a huge issue."
Sinn Féin TD for Waterford, Deputy Conor McGuiness said the "restrictive planning" and a "lack of local delivery" from the government are the major factors contributing to this crisis.
He said: "The new draft planning statement on Gaeltacht housing (published in March this year) will make things even worse and will actually weaken language protections when developing multi-unit housing estates in Gaeltacht areas.
"In the Waterford Gaeltacht for example, the new rules will slash the proportion of reserved housing for Irish speakers in the area from 80% down to just 37%."
Although the Waterford Gaeltacht is the smallest in the country, it's had the largest percentage increase in Irish speakers of all Gaeltacht areas since 2011, according to the last Census report with a 15% increase seen in Gaeltacht na nDéise, where most Gaeltacht areas saw a decline in the number of people who could speak Irish living in the area.
It is also one of only two Gaeltacht areas in the country to see an increase in daily Irish speakers over the age of three over the last 15 years.
Despite this, only 59 homes have been built in the area since 2010, while 222 were built in the ten years prior, according to Waterford City and County Council, highlighting a severe discrepancy between population growth and housing supply.
On this, Míchéal said: "It's going in the right direction, which is positive, but the biggest challenge is housing because the costs of houses here are huge. It's a beautiful area, so you have holiday homes and people coming down to buy holiday homes and the like."
Míchéal linked the rise of holiday homes and airbnbs in the area with the housing crisis native Irish speakers are experiencing in the area, saying: "It's making it so there's not housing available. That's the cause of it."
Figures from Inside Airbnb last year showed a dramatic surge in short-term lettings across all Gaeltacht regions in the last six years, with an increase in the number of 'entire home' listings in Gaeltacht areas of over 88% between May 2019 and September 2025.
By comparison, the national rise over that same period was 47.9%, clearly indicating that the Gaeltacht is disproportionately affected.
During this period 25 out of 26 Gaeltacht language planning areas saw an increase in the number of entire homes being let on Airbnb, with Gaeltacht na nDéise alone seeing an increase of 83.3% over the six-year period.
On this issue, Waterford City and County Council confirmed that 12% of the 862 housing units in the area are vacant holiday homes, and a further 7.5% are "otherwise vacant".
The Waterford Gaeltacht areas have seen a steady increase in daily and weekly Irish speakers over the last 15 years, according to Census records and Míchéal's own recollections.
"It's almost, in many ways amazing, how the Gaeltacht survived here. Like you're only looking at about 1,500 people," he said, "there's still such a strong Irish language community here".
Despite the area being close to larger towns and cities, the community has survived and remained rooted in An Rinn and An Sean Phobal.
Míchéal told this paper a large part of the Gaeltacht's continued survival is the ability to conduct your life through Irish while living there.
The major Irish language employment opportunities in the area, like Nemeton TV, Na Bróga Dearga and Coláiste na Rinne are "keeping people locally", Míchéal said.
"If you didn't have that employment here, I think, again you would have less people living in the area," he added.
He also credited the strong community organisations for the same reason, citing the "good school network" in the area from preschool right through secondary school all operating as Gaeilge and keeping the language active in the community.
Although housing remains an issue in communities across the country, the current issue in Gaeltacht na nDéise has another layer to it, according to Míchéal, as it replaces a minority language speaking community, which will have a huge impact in both the short and long term he said.
Meanwhile, Deputy McGuiness, in a statement to this newspaper, said: "A decade of an unaddressed housing crisis is threatening the language in these areas in a way that centuries of colonialism didn't manage to achieve. Young families of the next generation of Gaeilgeoirí are being completely priced out or blocked from building on family land."
People who have grown up in the Gaeltacht or have lived in the area for some time are now faced with either moving away and losing their community or living at home with their parents or family well into adulthood.
Although native Irish speakers can still speak Irish when they move away from home, and Míchéal says many still do, "it would definitely be diluted once they leave the area", as their chances of daily speaking dwindle.
"I know people in their early 20s and 30s, you know, and they've been brought up through Irish here," he continued. "Their family, their parents are living here, but they just can't either afford it or there isn't any houses for sale for them to live here, so they've just moved to other places."
"What the Gaeltachts are facing now," Míchéal continued, "is probably the biggest challenge they have faced ever, I would say. Because if a community can't live in the community, then you're not going to have a community at all in 10 or 30 or 50 years' time."
Waterford City and County Council has "several housing initiatives" in the works for Gaeltacht na nDéise, a spokesperson told this paper.
Approval has been granted for 12 social housing units in An Sean Phobal, with revisions ongoing to "better support family growth and reduce potential impacts on the Gaeltacht".
Other council housing initiatives for the area include a 2.55-hectare site in An Rinn which is being "master planned" for mixed housing, to include social, affordable and serviced sites and the croí cónaithe scheme which has returned seven vacant homes to use in the area since 2022.
The council also told Waterford News & Star that discussions are "ongoing" with Údarás na Gaeltachta regarding the rezoning of 1.5 hectares of land for housing in the area.
Údarás na Gaeltachta confirmed to this paper that they submitted an expression of interest to Waterford City & County Council in April for potential housing development land and that they, "look forward to progressing discussions on this land and working more closely with the Council and Gaeltacht stakeholders to help increase housing supply in the Gaeltacht."
Planning permission was also recently granted for a new community enterprise hub in the centre of An Rinn, at Baile na nGall Beag, Rinn Ó gCuanach.
Gaeltacht na nDéise may be the smallest Gaeltacht in the country, but the challenges its facing are anything but.
