Precarious lives: Exploring the intersection of insecure housing and energy conditions in Ireland

Abstract

This paper deploys the concept of ‘precariousness’ to examine the combined impacts of insecure and unaffordable housing and energy conditions on Irish households. Energy poverty is a major societal challenge as households struggle with rising energy costs and energy insecurity, which is then amplified by poor housing conditions, tenure insecurity and housing unaffordability. However, despite increasing research attention, the combined impacts of precarious housing and energy conditions are rarely considered together, or how this ‘double precarity’ might be distributed across social groups. Furthermore, it is unclear how precarious housing and energy conditions have evolved over time or in response to political-economic or energy market shocks. To address this gap, this paper connects debates within the energy poverty literature to more recent work on precarious housing. The paper develops a novel Housing-Energy Precarity Index (2020−2022) and applies it to data on Irish households (EU-SILC). It analyses the combined impacts of housing and energy precarity across housing tenures, demographic and socio-economic groups. We find that housing tenure is a particularly strong predictor of housing-energy precarity, and that private renters, low income groups, lone parents and younger persons (<25 years) are particularly exposed to this combined effect. The results will deliver pragmatic contributions for policy makers and practitioners at the intersection of housing and energy.