A crisis that robs a generation of motherhood... How can you think of raising kids, when you're still living at home? Aoife, 31, after three no-fault evictions says: 'At least if I lived in a van, it couldn't be taken from under me.'

Published: 21:45, 14 April 2026 | Updated: 21:45, 14 April 2026 Every few months, Aoife McGrath has a moment when she thinks she has finally found a foothold – a place she can settle, unpack properly, begin to make plans. Then the ground disappears again. Aged 31 and from south county Dublin – one of the country’s more affluent postcodes – Aoife has already lived through three no-fault evictions in four years. She is renting again now, once more scanning listings, bracing herself for the instability that has come to define adult life in Ireland for many women her age. ‘At least if I lived in a van,’ she says, only half-joking, ‘it couldn’t be taken from under me.’ Aoife works in disability services, teaching yoga and mindfulness. She competes internationally in calisthenics and is the first Irish woman to ever return home with a world championship medal in her category.  She speaks Irish, she represents her country abroad, she considers herself deeply, instinctively Irish. She is also keenly aware that her life – on paper accomplished, disciplined, high-performing – lacks the one thing she assumed would underpin everything else: a home. ‘I wrote in my journals when I was younger that by 31 I’d have my house, I’d be married and I’d have my first child,’ she says. ‘I would love that. I can’t wait to be a mum. That’s a huge sense of purpose for me.’ ‘But if you’re sharing with strangers, or living somewhere unsafe or temporary, why would you bring a child into that? It would be unfair. It would be irresponsible.’ For Aoife, housing insecurity is not an abstract policy failure or a talking point. It governs almost every decision she makes – where she works, how she dates, what she allows herself to imagine about the future. There is a version of Ireland that insists renting is freedom, that slipping into house-shares in your 20s and 30s is simply adulthood delayed, not denied. Aoife knows how misleading that story can be, particularly for women. ‘When you rent a room in a house-share, you’re not protected by domestic violence legislation,’ she says.  ‘If you live with someone who doesn’t respect boundaries or who feels unsafe, it’s incredibly difficult to get protection. You only find that out when you’re already in that situation.’ It is rarely discussed publicly, she says, because it is uncomfortable and because it punctures the assumption that renting is merely an inconvenience rather than a position of real vulnerability. For women, especially, it can mean living with strange men, navigating power dynamics behind closed doors and having nowhere truly private to retreat to. ‘You can end up confined to one room,’ she says. ‘Your life gets smaller, not bigger.’ ‘People assume you’re independent because you’re renting,’ Aoife says.  ‘But that’s not always true. When you tell someone you live in a house-share and have a difficult relationship with a housemate, that raises red flags. It shapes how you’re perceived.’ More than half of Irish adults aged 25 to 29 are still living in their family home, the highest rate in northern and western Europe.  What would once have been unthinkable now signals a deeper shift – this is no longer about impatience or poor timing, but about a system that is increasingly pricing women out of motherhood by eroding the years in which fertility is possible.  The data bears this out starkly. Ireland’s fertility rate stood at just 1.5 in 2024, well below the replacement level of 2.1 and down sharply from 2.0 only a decade earlier. Births have fallen by more than 13,000 a year since 2014, the equivalent of a town the size of Ennis disappearing annually from the register. Behind those numbers are lives lived in limbo. Housing is where almost every conversation about motherhood in modern Ireland now leads. Rents have risen by a staggering 115 per cent since 2010. In Dublin, the average new tenancy exceeds €2,200 a month, with supply at historic lows. Aoife can feel time tightening around those figures. Women are becoming mothers later, not because they are choosing to delay indefinitely, but because secure housing arrives later, if it arrives at all.  The average age of first-time mothers in Ireland is now just under 32, compared with 28.5 two decades ago. Many women do not reach any sense of housing stability until their mid-30s, when the window for choice has already narrowed. At just 31, Aoife has taken a step many women never imagined needing to consider. ‘I went to a fertility clinic four months ago,’ she says. ‘I’ve started saving so that if nothing has changed by my 33rd birthday, I’ll freeze my eggs.’ ‘People talk about egg freezing as if it’s a lifestyle accessory,’ she says. ‘They don’t talk about how invasive it is. ‘The hormone levels, the stress, the pain. It’s not simple, it’s not empowering, it’s a response to instability.’ For younger women, that pressure is already beginning to burrow in. Ella Glynn is considering moving abroad again. Picture: Michael Chester Ella Glynn is 27 and back in her childhood bedroom in Marino, on Dublin’s northside, trying not to think too far ahead.  She spent four years teaching in Vietnam, where an ordinary salary allowed her to rent a four-bedroom house and live with a level of independence that felt unremarkable at the time.  Returning to Ireland a year ago, that sense of adulthood receded almost immediately. She cannot comfortably bring a partner home. She has no certainty about where she will be living next year. When she tries to imagine having children, the thought stalls. ‘I can’t bring a baby into this,’ she says. ‘Motherhood is something my generation wants but we can’t quite reach it. The fear of instability overrides everything.’ Moving back into the family home has brought familiar dynamics with it. ‘It doesn’t matter what age you are,’ Ella says. ‘The old roles just appear. I’m nearly 30 and I feel like a teenager again.’ The contrast with her life abroad has been difficult to reconcile. ‘In Vietnam, I had four bedrooms, a life that felt like it was actually mine,’ she says. ‘When I think about having children now, I think, if I can’t have a life that’s mine, how am I supposed to give one to someone else?’ She could rent but that brings its own illusion. ‘You feel like a pretend adult – you look independent, but you’re not progressing,’ she says. ‘You’ll never own it.’ Ella has given herself until Christmas to decide whether she can remain in Ireland at all – a timeline that echoes, at an earlier stage, the narrowing sense of time described by slightly older women navigating the same pressures. For women who do cross the threshold into motherhood, the story does not suddenly become easier. Tanya White is 33 and lives in Wicklow. She works as a healthcare assistant – trained, experienced and fully qualified – and is raising two children with autism.  Motherhood, she says, has not brought security, it has exposed the absence of support underpinning family life in Ireland. ‘There are no services,’ she says plainly. ‘I’ve written the emails, gone to meetings, protested – nothing changes. My children have been turned away from schools and support groups because there’s no funding.’ She lives in a rural area with no nearby GP and no school equipped to support her children’s needs. Accessing basic care requires hours of driving each week. ‘It’s not living,’ she says. ‘It’s constant survival.’ Despite her qualifications, Tanya cannot return to work. Childcare providers, where they exist at all, have quoted her more than €2,000 a month – and many have refused outright, telling her they are not resourced to support children with disabilities. ‘I’m asked all the time if I have childcare,’ she says. ‘The answer is no, there isn’t any. I want to work, but I’ve been forced into staying at home and fighting just to bridge some kind of income.’ Her experience helps explain why so many women hesitate before becoming mothers. ‘People say they’re putting life on hold,’ she says. ‘But life doesn’t go on hold, especially for women. This isn’t a delay – it’s cancelling your plans because of economics.’ For people observing from the outside, the message is unmistakable. ‘If this is what happens when you do have children,’ Tanya says, ‘why would anyone do it?’ The generational contrast is just as stark for parents looking on. Claire Clarkson's two daughters still live with her. Picture: Tom Honan Claire Clarkson grew up in Co Clare and moved out at 18, rented a two-bedroom apartment, and began her adult life without drama or parental subsidy.  She runs a beauty business now and is in her 40s, watching her daughters – aged 23 and 31 – come and go from the same house she raised them in, not for lack of ambition or effort, but because Ireland has not made room for them. ‘They get to their early to mid-20s and it’s like a brick wall,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing. Where is their future?’ The only young people she knows buying homes have two strong incomes and parental financial support – a reality rarely acknowledged publicly. ‘Nobody’s doing it by themselves,’ she says. ‘Nobody.’ Her elder daughter’s married friends have not yet started families. ‘That was unheard of even ten years ago,’ she says. ‘They don’t even have their independence yet.’ Ireland’s childcare costs remain among the highest in the OECD. Full-time creche fees routinely run between €1,500 and €2,000 a month, and one in five parents leaves paid work after having a child because continuing simply makes no financial sense. For women already priced out of stable housing, the economics of motherhood can make the whole project feel less like a choice and more like a verdict. Niamh Madden has watched this play out up close since founding Sisterhood in 2020, an Irish community for women without children that drew almost 200 members within its first few months. The appetite, she says, was immediate and unmistakable. Women typically join in their 30s, she says, at the point when friends are moving into family life and the sense of being left behind becomes acute. ‘Nearly everyone who joins says the same thing – their friends have gone off and had kids, and they feel like the only one, the left-out person in the group,’ she says. But Madden is careful about how she frames what the group represents, because not everyone who joins has made the same kind of decision – or any decision at all. ‘Some women made a clear choice,’ she says. ‘Others simply ran out of time. For some, the decision makes itself – they don’t meet the right person, the years pass and it’s deeply painful. That’s a very different experience from choosing this life freely.’ The distinction matters because it is rarely made publicly – the conversation around childless women tends to flatten very different experiences into a single narrative, quietly erasing those for whom neither autonomy nor choice applied. ‘I really feel for the women who want children in their lives but are restricted,’ she says. ‘Because a lot of the women in Sisterhood have been lucky enough to have a genuine choice and that’s very different.’ ‘There’s a connection between being afforded a good education and having the agency to make that decision deliberately,’ she says. ‘Whether we like to say it or not.’ For women without that security – renting in house-shares, living at home, watching their savings fail to keep pace with deposit requirements – the question of whether to have children has already been quietly answered for them. Not by choice. By circumstance. Last December, the National Economic and Social Council warned that Ireland has already passed peak baby and peak child, and that without urgent intervention, the country risks a demographic slide from which recovery will be increasingly difficult. When asked what she would say to those in government, Aoife McGrath does not hesitate. ‘I’m a proud Irish woman,’ she says. ‘They don’t have a clock ticking over their heads. We do. ‘Please act before our time runs out,’ she adds quietly. Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.