Ronan Lyons is Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin, where his primary research areas are housing markets, urban economics, and economic history.
Over 60% of 18–34-year-olds in Ireland live with their parents, compared to just one in six Danes. And just 4% of Irish 18–24-year-olds in Ireland live alone or with a partner, compared to two thirds of Swedes. We have failed our younger adults in housing.
Ireland needs to fix the leak through which value created by society slips into private hands – starting with a register of land ownership.
New data shows a catastrophic shortage of new rental accommodation. Adding a few thousand rental homes – in Dublin only – couldn't possibly be the cure for the rental market.
As though things weren't bad enough, the spike in inflation has upset the economics of housebuilding. The current level of costs, supply chain disruption and uncertainty is incompatible with Ireland meeting its housing needs, as evidenced by new data.
The outbreak of Covid-19 seemed like a classic recipe for falling housing prices. Instead, the opposite happened, and the impact is being felt acutely in counties in Wexford, Waterford, Kerry and Donegal.
Official Ireland's view is that the country will grow slowly. In reality, as the census shows, Ireland is one of the fastest-growing countries in Europe. This failure to plan for growth has had catastrophic consequences for Irish infrastructure – not least its housing.
More than half of households that rent are in receipt of State supports, but the system is effectively a lottery. And that lottery is locking people in to and out of a broken system. Ultimately, it is the binary nature of supports that is the problem.
Some of those criticising the Croí Cónaithe scheme have been consistent in their suspicion developers are making large profits from building homes. The problem with this theory is that there is effectively no evidence for it.
Stark new data reveals that sitting tenants have seen rental increases of 40 per cent over the past decade, less than half the increase in the open market, while the average lease length has doubled over the last 15 years. It raises significant questions about the effectiveness of rent controls.
An Oireachtas committee heard last week that we may end up "retrofitting the retrofit in ten years' time" due to poor standards. But what do we know about the energy efficiency of homes that are being built now?
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