When Lisa Ryan’s relationship ended in 2022, a lack of affordable and suitable options meant she and her ex-partner would have to continue living together with their young son, even though they were no longer a couple.

“We needed to make it work that we would be able to share custody, and that our son was not going to be negatively impacted by having to move around schools or anything like that,” she says.

But the situation was “to the detriment of both of our mental health”, she says, “because realistically that’s not a situation that you could be in for very long”.

The percentage of people in Ireland who are separated or divorced stands at 6 per cent, according to the 2022 census. Relationship breakdowns are rarely easy, but when coupled with a housing and rent crisis that prevents one partner from finding or affording somewhere else to live, a whole new set of challenges can emerge.

Ryan, from Wexford but living in Dublin, and her son’s father had been together for almost a decade. She says she was “trying to get over the grief process [of a long-term relationship ending] ... you’re then having to deal with the fact that their dishes are still in the sink. You’re still having the same arguments as what you would have about the way the house is, but you’re not getting any of the good parts of the relationship”.

“Both of us were being driven completely mad by the other person, by the end of it,” she says. “I was dying last year, when the election was on, for one of them [politicians] to come to the door so that I could go ‘this is the situation that you have people living through’. I’ve been dealing with mental health issues for a number of years, so it wouldn’t have been the first time that I had issues with it, but I was definitely made a lot