In this second episode with Ronan Lyons, we wonder how did a country that once struggled to keep its people end up unable to house them? The answer is a story of unintended consequences. Population booms that were visible but ignored, tax incentives that pushed homes into the wrong places, a planning system that feared apartments and subsidised sprawl and a country that urbanised its jobs, but never its housing. Along the way, we unpack the myth that the crisis began in 2008, that credit is the main culprit, that Ireland is uniquely obsessed with homeownership. Instead, what emerges is something more unsettling, a system shaped over decades by reasonable decisions that, taken together, produced something deeply dysfunctional. Across the Western world, housing markets are showing the same cracks. If you understand how the system was built, you realise just how hard it will be to fix.

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