Full coverage: Housing

We are not yet through Covid, and the housing crisis is already back on centre stage. In this extensive interview, Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage Darragh O'Brien talks about how he intends to turn things around.

Nowhere in Irish life is the gap wider between diagnosis and potential cure than housing. Housing is complex, complicated, political, distributional, financial. It is all of these and more. Darragh O’Brien needs a solution to housing that figures out the social physics of it.

Multiple assessments of the Irish economy agree that the long-term issues facing us are intergenerational inequality, firms dealing with technological change, and climate change. Here is how we can tackle them.

Khaled Sakr led the IMF’s recent mission to Ireland. In an extensive interview, he talks about how the crisis accelerated a two-tier economy, the need to get more women into the labour force and institutional investors in the housing market.

The sale of an entire housing estate in Co Kildare did not happen by accident. It occurred because of policy choices that the Irish state made over the past eight years – choices that have changed the nature of home ownership and distorted the housing market.

A high-stakes row over the future of the North Lotts and Grand Canal Dock Strategic Development Zone planning scheme now looks set to go to court.

Stalwarts of the Irish middle class like teachers and psychologists can't compete against Chinese, Russian or UK funds hunting for yield. So mandating that a percentage of actual owners live in their actual houses seems the only way to turn an internationally traded asset into a home.

Following the resignation of a former housing minister, Dublin Bay South voters will set the stage for a housing election – pitting wealth against income.

As Ireland searches for a more sustainable housing model, the group that spearheaded greener living in Cloughjordan is often held as an example but it wasn’t spared by the recession’s credit crunch. Through sheer willpower, its inhabitants have kept it afloat.

Mairead Mackle left a career in podiatry over 25 years ago to set up a business that focused on providing home care and housing services. She discusses the expansion of Homecare Independent Living, the impact of the pandemic and her commitment to empowering women in the workplace.