Full coverage: Housing

Modular buildings were hailed as the solution to Ireland’s housing crisis. But the sector has seen significant setbacks, due in large part to added strain on the private housing market and a shortage in construction supplies caused by the pandemic.

Foreign funds, rising rents and scarce mortgages are symptoms of a collective decision to insulate the borrowers of the past at the expense of the borrowers of today. Consequently, the prospect of home ownership is ever more distant for far too many.

Labour senator Rebecca Moynihan on how her party lost its way and why building houses is more important than idealism.

Special Development Zones were designated to deliver tens of thousands of homes, and have largely failed. Now fast-track Strategic Housing Developments, too, are under threat from the increasing use of the courts by objectors, warns urban planner Tom Phillips.

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.