How The Housing Market Was Designed to Fail - Part 2

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.5 • 692 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2026

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
0:06.8	This podcast is powered by ACAST.
0:13.1	How you doing there?
0:14.3	Again, time for the podcast.
0:16.3	We are doing a special three-part series on the housing market in Ireland,
0:20.0	but this is applicable to all over
0:21.5	the Western world. We're doing this with Professor Ronan Lyons. And number one is we actually
0:27.9	described it as the brittle housing market. Now we're going to look at not just what the
0:34.2	housing market is, the state of it, but how we got here, how it was actually created,
0:38.4	because this didn't just happen accidentally.
0:41.3	This has been the result of explicit policies to enrich one part of the society, to enslave
0:47.0	another part of the society, and ultimately this is the process.
0:51.0	This is the result of incredibly bad housing demographic population planning.
0:58.8	So let us rip into episode two of our piece on housing. And we are going to be talking to Professor
1:08.3	Ronald Lyons about how we construct this dysfunctional
1:12.4	housing market in the first place. Hope you enjoy it. Let's go to Trinity College and talk to Professor
1:17.1	Ronan Lyons. Ronan, you're back in the room. Good to see you. Thanks for having me back. I thought
1:24.3	that might be banned after the last time. Well, no, the Department of Housing
1:28.3	have issued an official complaint. It is now at the Podcast Complaints Commission.
1:34.4	I'm in a safe location. I'm not disclosing where it is. Exactly. I'm sure if the Irish
1:41.7	podcasting landscape was governed by, let's say, an official organization,
1:46.5	there would be an Irish podcasting commission, and they would have some, let's say,
	...

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