The Housing Finale: Can Ireland Build Its Way Out?
The David McWilliams Podcast
David McWilliams
4.5 • 692 Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
After two episodes on how Ireland’s housing market became so brittle, we get to the only question that matters: how do you actually fix it? In this final part of our housing series with Ronan Lyons, we move from diagnosis to prescription. If the crisis was built over decades through bad incentives, bad planning, weak population forecasting, and a deep bias against density, what would it take to reverse it? We talk about viability, tax incentives, apartments, one-off housing, planning reform, and the hard truth that Ireland cannot solve this crisis with slogans, targets, or recycled talking points. It needs a system that matches the way people actually live now: smaller households, urban jobs, rising population, and huge pent-up demand. This is the finale of the series, so we pull the threads together. Not just what went wrong, but what a serious housing strategy would look like if the country finally decided to stop managing decline and start building for the future.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How you doing there? Welcome back to the third part of our trilogy on Irish, but also on |
| 0:10.3 | Anglo-Sphere housing. What went wrong? How did we get here? What is the state of play? And the |
| 0:17.8 | third version of our trilogy is going to say, |
| 0:21.4 | how do we build a healthy housing system? |
| 0:24.9 | Not just here in Ireland, but all over the English-speaking words. |
| 0:28.8 | And increasingly in other necks of the woods where a combination of rising population, |
| 0:36.8 | changing dynamics, etc., is also leading to housing problems. |
| 0:42.1 | Not in the same scale as ours, but clearly, if nothing is done, could end up somewhere like Ireland is now. |
| 0:49.0 | And we are blessed, I would say, to have in the room Professor Ronan Lyons a titan, a lion in this particular |
| 0:58.3 | area. Roland, it's great to have you again. All right. Episode three, how do we fix this? Or a different |
| 1:05.8 | slogan for episode three, make housing boring again. That's... Ooh, I like it. |
| 1:11.7 | That's me and my little baseball cap. |
| 1:14.3 | Because that's what success ultimately looks like. |
| 1:16.2 | We talked about a brutal housing system. |
| 1:17.8 | MHBA. |
| 1:18.7 | So I'm just... |
| 1:19.2 | I'll work on the acronym. |
| 1:20.4 | We'll get there. |
| 1:21.2 | We'll get there. |
| 1:22.1 | Okay. |
| 1:22.7 | I actually would love to have one of these |
| 1:25.9 | and walk into a bar |
... |
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