As a fresh wave of conflict engulfed the Middle East in the past week – with consequences yet to emerge on migration – The Currency published Niall’s months-long investigation into the ultimate owners of Ireland’s multi-billion-euro refugee accommodation industry.

While large individual payments to companies contracted by the State to provide beds for asylum seekers and Ukrainians make regular headlines, they don’t mean much until those revenue streams are collated at group level.

There are striking comparison points between the ultimate beneficial owners of commercial refugee accommodation payments and the providers of accommodation of Irish-resident homeless people, which we analysed last year.

While the State has virtually stopped booking hotel rooms for homeless people, this remains a major avenue to put a roof over the head of international protection applicants (Ipas). Meanwhile, specialised corporate groups have developed in domestic and international emergency accommodation.

Some are straddling both markets, such as Seamus “Banty” McEnaney and his family, the partly offshore-owned Forbairt Group, or the institutional investor-backed Coldec Group. 

One trend emerging from our reporting on the commercial emergency accommodation industry is how crucial it has been in generating profit for the companies involved.

For those that existed before – typically budget or mid-range hotel owners – access to a homeless, Ipas or Ukrainian accommodation contract has typically meant a swing from little or no profit to sustained healthy margins.

Last week also saw the introduction of new rules for private residential tenancies, and Ronan analysed the limitations of such regulatory moves when the private housing market remains fundamentally unbalanced.

One overlooked lever the State has at its disposal in this market is its role as the country’s largest tenant.

Crunching the numbers

The Currency’s relentless hunt for information on taxpayer-funded payments to landlords started in 2022, when I first obtained figures on the largest recipients of the Housing Assistance Payment (Hap).

This scheme subsidises the landlords of tenants on the social housing waiting list so that they can stay in private rented homes they otherwise could not afford (a sister scheme reserved for social welfare recipients is known as the Residential Accommodation Scheme – Ras).

Our coverage has since built into a body of data revealing the scale of accommodation procurement.  There is no easy way to collate these figures – no Government office you can ring to ask, “How much did you pay landlords last year?”

To write this article, I had to parse our previous reporting with the latest publications from the Departments of Housing, Finance, and Public Expenditure, and the Comptroller and Auditor General. 

While the figures I used encompassed some costs beyond accommodation, such as food served in Ipas centres, they do not include any payments to non-profit landlords like approved housing bodies and homeless charities, nor any rent paid for office space.

They also exclude other outsourced State services where access to property forms a significant part of public procurement, such as private children’s homes contracted to Tusla.

In 2024, the latest year for which full figures are available, the Government paid €2.9 billion to commercial landlords to put roofs over people’s heads. The largest part, over €1.8 billion, went towards Ipas and Ukrainian accommodation.

The other billion was shared between Hap and Ras; the leasing of privately-owned homes by local authorities and approved housing bodies for social housing; and private homeless accommodation.

2024 was a pivotal year. 

One year ago, I reported on homeless accommodation procurement in Dublin up until 2023 following a 1,000-day freedom-of-information battle with the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE).

Shortly afterwards, Dublin City Council began publishing quarterly data on those payments. This left a gap for 2024, for which I have since obtained the same data for the capital – the largest homeless emergency accommodation market in Ireland.

Fortunes were made in 2024, when providers that had emerged in the previous years grew their contracts aggressively. This was especially beneficial to those at the top of the table.

Concentration increased, with the top five groups contracted to the DRHE capturing more than half of homeless payments in the capital for the first time. 

Coldec, especially, became the single largest recipient of homeless accommodation funding in Dublin. The group’s €32.4 million in payments narrowly beats the McEnaney family’s.

The Forbairt Group, too, stood out with a 60 per cent increase in this revenue stream that year. The McDermott Hospitality Group and a group of companies owned by Cork-based Kieran Hayes also enjoyed multi-million-euro rises in 2024 payments

The market for such private homeless accommodation is only set to grow. The Department of Housing overspent its homeless accommodation budget by over 50 per cent last year, supplementary estimates showed in November, and ended up spending €460 million across private providers and charities in 2025.

Budget 2026 has further increased this funding to €513.5 million this year. By contrast, there is just €50 million allocated to capital spending in the non-profit homeless accommodation sector.

This leaves little prospect for a drop in the share of current spending paid to commercial operators. If this 70 per cent share is maintained, they are in line to receive €360 million this year.

Peak landlord republic?

Elsewhere, however, there are signs that the State is pulling back from throwing money at landlords to secure accommodation. 2024 could also prove to mark the peak in such overall spending.

This is most visible in refugee accommodation, under a combined effort to secure lower prices from landlords and reduce the number of applicants admitted into Ireland since the Department of Justice took over responsibility for this service in May 2025. After a fall of over €200 million in spending last year, Budget 2026 forecasts another €120 million drop this year.

Leasing from private landlords, too, is becoming less popular among State-funded bodies to procure social housing. Those rents fell from €147.7 million in 2024 to €133.9 million last year in the Department of Housing’s budget.

The only such scheme mentioned in the Government’s new housing plan is the Repair and Lease Scheme, where owners of vacant properties are subsidised to refurbish them on the condition that they lease them to the local authority for social housing.

Instead, the plan specifies that the 12,000 new social homes to be added every year should now all be “new build” until 2030. (Buying existing homes has fallen out of favour, too.)

Compare this with the so-called “targeted leasing initiative” three years ago, when then-housing minister Darragh O’Brien sought 1,000 rental homes on the open market as a quick-fix solution to housing shortages.

Overall, I estimate that public payments to for-profit landlords decreased to €2.7 billion last year and are on track for a further decline to €2.6 billion this year.

As the State’s budget grows, their share of all government expenditure fell from 2.5 per cent in 2024 to around 2.1 per cent last year. This figure could drop to below two per cent this year.

There seems to be a slow realisation in government quarters that part of the solution to the housing crisis resides in the State no longer competing with its own population to rent accommodation. Unwinding almost €3 billion in such annual spending, however, cannot happen overnight.

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Elsewhere this week, Dan analysed the fallout from the war in the Middle East for the Irish economy. Joe explained how such international shocks help explain the difference in the financial structure of the aviation industry compared with other sectors.

A company linked to developer Greg Kavanagh was sued over a €1.8 million share deal for a residential development site at Longwood Village in Co Meath. Francesca had the story.

The cybersecurity scale-up Evervault wants to encrypt all online sensitive data, and it has just closed a $25 million (€21.6 million) series B round, attracting a new lead investor. Its 26-year-old founder, Shane Curran, told Tom how the deal came together.