'Housing a Nation' a new book by Lorcan Sirr
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What does the latest housing market data reveal about price trends and uncertainty?
The Claire Burns Show on News Talk. With Aviva Insurance.
On the day that we learn that house prices might just be leveling off, I'm joined by the author of a new book on how housing has always dominated our history and our lives in Ireland. Housing policy analyst Lorcan Sur has followed seven generations of a family. For his new book, Housing a Nation and he joins me now. You're welcome to the show, Lorkin. Thanks, Claire. Congratulations on the new tome which I have in front of me here. But let's talk about those figures this morning. Is this good news?
Yeah, I think what what the report shows is there's a lot of uncertainty out there. And one of the like we have to look at the things the main drivers of house prices uh are things like interest rates and and employment. And of both of those, like we really don't know what's happening. The ECB has increased the race twice this year, uh the last time just earlier on this month on September the sixteenth by a quarter of a percent. And that course comes through to our banks. Which means that, you know, it becomes more expensive to borrow so people can borrow less. So what's gonna happen there? It's also, you know, uh employment and wages are hugely important with house prices and we see layoffs now from some of the tech companies.
And of course then at the same time unions are going in, you know, negotiating for higher wages and the more wages people have, the more they can more they can borrow. So there's a whole lot of kind of cogs in this wheel at the moment. And I think the message I got from the Dart report this morning was l was uncertainty. We really don't know uh But but but But you're not going to do that.
you don't see the silver lining that we are ha seeing more houses come on stream, so prices are moderating.
No, we're definitely not seeing more we've seen more houses being built, but actually as a proportion of what's being built, we see kind of less houses being being sold. So for example, in in in twenty seventeen, in July in twenty seventeen was the last kind of month I could go back to, there was two hundred and forty seven new houses sold.
How does Lorcan Sirr use a seven‑generation family story to explain Ireland’s housing history?
Okay. But we built seven and a half thousand that year. So two hundred and forty seven in July this year there was two hundred and ninety-five houses uh sold, and we built thirty six and a half thousand last year. So what you see is that even though we're building more houses, uh we're actually there's only there's like only about thirty percent of them actually coming out there for people to buy so most of them are being So most of them are
being rented or used for social housing?
Most of them are being used for social housing for investment by large scale renters and there's always about fifteen to twenty percent that are one off houses that will never be sold anyway. So the the makeup has changed over the years.
All right, well let's come to the book and going through it at the weekend I thought, Well here he is now telling us that it's always been desperate. In Ireland, do we ever not have a housing problem?
No, uh we've always had ho housing has always been front and centre because people have always turned to the states, you know, to help them with the basics of life, you know, education and housing and health and all that kind of stuff. And people what you find going back so I start the book in the early eighteen hundreds, you know, uh and the first census in Ireland was eighteen thirteen, actually not eighteen twenty one, but they made such a hains with that they abandoned it after a couple of years and they gave it to kind of large local landlords basically to run that r run it and they couldn't do it. So uh eighteen twenty one. So it started around then. And what you find is, you know, people were were it's the same stuff cropped up since the eighteen twenties as now, right?
Um that the idea of of you know looking for help with your house, that that it's all political. Like the lesson I've learned, oh, you know, writing about two hundred years of housing, in that it's all political, politics are priorities basically, and and it's power, really.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does the latest housing market data reveal about price trends and uncertainty?
0:01–1:43
2
How does Lorcan Sirr use a seven‑generation family story to explain Ireland’s housing history?
1:43–3:35
3
Why were the 1920s and 1940s considered periods of proactive housing policy?
3:35–5:16
4
What lessons does the book draw from the shift to market‑led housing after the 1980s?
5:16–7:07
5
Why are today’s cost‑rental schemes ending up more expensive than mortgages?
7:07–8:50
6
How has the sale of council houses affected the current stock of social housing?
8:50–10:45
7
What alternative models (e.g., state‑built homes for sale) could break the home‑as‑asset cycle?
10:45–12:35
8
Can Ireland move toward a Berlin‑style housing system that prioritises security over ownership?
12:35–14:28