Éowyn and Martin’s Return – Emerald Archives

Dateline

Ireland in 2025 was a country of striking contrasts: economically confident but socially strained, increasingly influential in international affairs yet preoccupied with homes, public services and the practical consequences of rapid population growth. The year opened with a change at the summit of government and an exceptional Atlantic storm. It closed with new plans for house-building, infrastructure and public expenditure whose success would be judged only in later years. Firmly dated events tell much of the story, but the deeper significance of 2025 lay in the pressures that joined them: a crowded housing market, dependence on internationally mobile investment, climate disruption, and the continuing task of making cooperation across the Irish border ordinary and durable.

A New Coalition

On 23 January, Dáil Éireann nominated Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil as Taoiseach, and President Michael D. Higgins appointed him accordingly. Martin returned to an office he had previously held from 2020 to 2022. The new administration brought Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael together again, supported by the Regional Independent Group; Simon Harris of Fine Gael became Tánaiste. Its formation represented continuity as much as alteration. The two large parties of the centre-right retained control of government after the 2024 general election, but the inclusion of independents underlined the importance of local and regional priorities in an increasingly fragmented parliamentary landscape.

The coalition’s programme, published the same day, made housing supply, public safety, competitiveness, health and infrastructure central commitments. Its language of “securing” Ireland’s future reflected an atmosphere in which prosperity could not be taken for granted. Government had substantial tax receipts and exceptionally high employment, but also faced shortages of housing, school places, electricity capacity, water infrastructure and skilled labour. On 19 March, Martin established a Ministerial Council on National Security, chaired by the Taoiseach and bringing together ministers, senior civil servants, Gardaí, Defence Forces and cyber-security leadership. The body did not alter Ireland’s military neutrality; rather, it showed that cyber threats, organised crime, undersea infrastructure and international instability had become subjects for more coordinated state attention.

Law, Gaza and Diplomacy

Ireland’s foreign policy was unusually visible. On 6 January it filed a declaration of intervention at the International Court of Justice in South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention. On 28 February it also submitted observations in separate advisory proceedings concerning Israel’s obligations towards the United Nations, international organisations and other states in the occupied Palestinian territory. These were legal and diplomatic interventions, not a ruling by Ireland upon the merits of the underlying case. Their importance lay in the decision to argue publicly for a broader reading of states’ obligations under the Convention and for the protection of civilians through international law.

The moves were consistent with Ireland’s long-established preference for multilateral institutions, but they also carried domestic political weight. Gaza had become an intense subject of public mobilisation and parliamentary debate. Ireland’s 2024 recognition of the State of Palestine was the immediate background, while the 2025 filings placed the State within proceedings at The Hague. For a small European country, the year demonstrated how legal argument, humanitarian concern and diplomatic reputation could be used as instruments of foreign policy even where Ireland possessed little direct power over the conflict itself.

Connections Across the Border

Relations within the island remained shaped by the Good Friday Agreement rather than by constitutional change. On 25 February the Government announced more than €50 million from the Shared Island Fund for programmes to be developed over five years. These included cross-border tourism around Carlingford Lough, the Cuilcagh Lakelands geopark and Sliabh Beagh; arts and cultural-heritage collaboration; civic-society partnerships; and an island-wide nature-restoration programme. In August, four higher-education collaborations involving institutions north and south received €16 million through the North-South Research Programme.

Such announcements were modest beside arguments about Irish unity, but historically meaningful in another way. They treated the border as a place needing joint practical work on landscapes, research, culture and local economies. The projects did not presume political agreement between unionist, nationalist and other traditions. Instead, they used institutions created or encouraged by the peace settlement to build habitual cooperation. That patient approach remained a defining feature of official Dublin policy in 2025: reconciliation was presented not as a finished achievement, but as work conducted through communities, universities, agencies and shared places.

More People, More Pressure

The scale of demographic change framed everyday life. The Central Statistics Office estimated the State’s population at 5.46 million in April 2025. Growth created demand in towns, suburbs and rural communities alike: for rented accommodation, homes to buy, classrooms, medical appointments, roads and public transport. It also made Ireland more socially varied, with newcomers contributing to workplaces, schools and civic life. Yet the pace of growth sharpened debates over whether services and construction could keep up, and gave political force to concerns that were felt most immediately in queues, rents and overcrowded emergency accommodation.

Work was plentiful by recent historical standards. By the final quarter of the year, 2,832,900 people were in employment, although unemployment had also risen over the previous year. On 1 January the national minimum wage increased to €13.50 an hour. Tax changes raised credits and altered the Universal Social Charge, while the rent tax credit increased. These measures offered some relief to household budgets, but could not by themselves resolve the wider mismatch between earnings and housing costs. In education, a more tangible change arrived with the 2025–26 school year: the free schoolbooks scheme was extended to senior-cycle pupils in post-primary schools, bringing books and core classroom resources within the scheme for roughly 400,000 students.

Building, Planning and Public Money

Housing remained the test against which the Government was most likely to be judged. More than 36,000 new dwellings were completed during 2025, an important level of output in a country that had struggled for years to build enough homes. But completions were not synonymous with affordability, location or secure tenure. In November, the Government published Delivering Homes, Building Communities, a new plan that aimed for 300,000 homes by the end of 2030, alongside 72,000 social homes and 90,000 affordable-housing supports. It was a statement of intended future delivery, not an accomplishment of 2025, and it acknowledged the scale of the shortfall still confronting renters, first-time buyers and people in emergency accommodation.

Planning law was also being recast in stages. Parts of the Planning and Development Act 2024 came into force in June, August, October and December 2025, including provisions connected with development control, enforcement, judicial review, plans and housing strategy. The phased commencements mattered because delays in planning, appeals, judicial process, infrastructure and construction finance had all become part of the public explanation for slow supply. The State therefore sought to change the machinery as well as fund individual projects. Whether those reforms would deliver homes faster remained an open question at year’s end.

The economy gave Government unusual fiscal room, while exposing a structural vulnerability. December goods exports reached €16 billion, with chemicals and related products by far the largest category; the United States alone took €3.3 billion that month. Revenue later recorded €34.7 billion in corporation-tax receipts during 2025, though that total was affected by receipts connected with a 2024 Court of Justice of the European Union ruling. More fundamentally, foreign-owned multinationals supplied the great majority of net corporation tax. Ireland’s prosperity thus rested heavily upon pharmaceutical, technology and internationally traded services, sectors able to generate high-value activity but sensitive to global policy, trade relations and corporate decisions made beyond the island.

Culture, Language and Creative Work

Culture was not merely decorative in this year of economic and social uncertainty. In June, the Basic Income for the Arts pilot was extended by six months, to February 2026, while the Government considered what should follow it. Research published in September reported that participants spent substantially more time on their creative practice and experienced improvements in financial security and wellbeing. The scheme remained limited in reach, but it expressed a significant policy idea: that artistic labour, often irregular and poorly paid, could be treated as work worthy of sustained public support rather than intermittent subsidy alone.

The Irish language continued to be supported through public-service obligations, Gaeltacht programmes, education and media. Responsibility for coordinating the 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language passed in June to the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht. This was administrative rather than revolutionary, but it belonged to a continuing effort to make Irish a usable language of public life as well as a school subject and cultural inheritance. Across the country, bilingual signs, official documents, broadcasting, festivals and local language initiatives made that effort visible, even as English remained overwhelmingly dominant in daily commerce and most urban life.

The Weather as History

The year’s most immediate common experience was Storm Éowyn. On Friday 24 January, Mace Head in County Galway recorded a gust of 184 kilometres per hour and a ten-minute mean wind speed of 142 kilometres per hour, both provisional highs in Ireland’s digital climate record. The storm caused widespread damage and disruption; ESB Networks recorded approximately 768,000 customer outages at its peak. For households, farms, businesses and emergency services, it was an event measured in fallen trees, damaged roofs, closed roads and days without electricity rather than in meteorological statistics alone.

Éowyn was only the beginning of a remarkable climatic year. Met Éireann later identified 2025 as Ireland’s second warmest year on record since 1900. Spring was the warmest and sunniest on record, summer the warmest, and autumn the fourth wettest in an 85-year series. These annual conclusions should not obscure local variation, but they gave an accumulating climate pattern a memorable calendar year. In 2025, environmental history was not remote background: it reached the electricity network, farms, coasts, rivers, insurance, household routines and the public vocabulary of resilience.

By December, Ireland had not solved the contradictions revealed during the year. A growing, employed and export-oriented society still struggled to house people securely; a State with exceptional corporate-tax income remained dependent on a narrow group of multinational payers; and a country proud of diplomacy had little control over the wars that animated public concern. Yet the return of Micheál Martin, the response to Éowyn, the new housing programme and expanded all-island cooperation made 2025 a clearly defined chapter: a year in which the institutions of the Irish State tried to turn present abundance into longer-term capacity.

Primary Sources

Tags: Basic Income for the Arts, Dáil Éireann, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, International Court of Justice, Ireland Year by Year