“We are all educated. We all went to college. We moved up to Dublin. We work all the time. Yet there’s just no hope of any of us buying a house,” says 28-year-old Muireann Nagle, sitting at the kitchen table of the home she rents in south Co Dublin, with two of her housemates – all friends from Tipperary.

Housing has become one of the dominant issues the 2020 general election, and the cohort sometimes glibly referred to as “generation rent” could yet be the ones to decide its outcome. This is the demographic in their late 20s or 30s .