Irish Times

[Lang Spoon]

She does get the train to Heuston every day so that’s probably better than driving it, but the cost. Jesus.

[Lang Spoon]

I was half contemplating renting an entire gaff in Belfast city centre (the grid pisses over Dublin City Centre for my tastes) but I just couldn’t face it. And the train is crazy slow.

[Lang Spoon]

Is Nenagh where they make fire engines?

Nice one Centurion, like it.

[Lang Spoon]

It’s almost a pity the structural funds created a very good motorway network here. So just about anywhere that isn’t Donegal or Darkest Kerry/West Cork is in theory a doable commute to the Great Wen. There’s another guy in work who commutes from Longford town, actually left Athlone and moved back to his hometown (and one of the biggest shitholes in Northern Europe) cos the rent was getting crazy in Athlone. Athlone. But driving that every day, can’t see how you’d save fuck all really.

[anton pulisov]

Not only that, but why would anyone want to do it?

If faced with the choice from driving in from Athlone and not working in Ireland, I'll choose the latter every time.

[Lang Spoon]

Air bnb may have taken half the rental properties off the Dublin market to real live people as well. Oh for a Revenue Commissioners Reckoning for those greedy rentier cunts.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

When did the property boom start again in Dublin? These are the kind of prices i remember from 10+ years ago when everyone said it was unsustainable which resulted in the crash and people with massive negative equity. At least the UK isn't the only country to never learn.

It's not a boom, it's a shortage. It's really not the same thing. The number of houses changing hands is very low, and primarily limited to cash buyers. You can only get 3.5 times your salary in a loan, so you need to have a large proportion of the cost of the house already. As for the Ghost estates, that was a slightly exaggerated phenomenon. They were counting a lot of places where work hadn't even begun, or was at a site clearing state. They finished all the unfinished houses, and people live in them.

The root problem is that we've built about six houses since 2008, we were bankrupt, and faced with contractionary budgets for the first seven years of that decade and the population has grown by about 300,000 in that time frame. We don't need to build any more houses in this country. We have more 3-5 bed houses for our size than virtually every country on earth. What we need are about 50,000 assisted living houses, and about 150,000 apartments in our major cities. The reason that there is a shortage of houses for families in dublin, is because there are frequently three to five people who should be living in apartments sharing them.

Portlaoise is only about 40 minutes from the red cow on a motorway. Even Cahir is only an hour and a half from the Red Cow. that's a journey that used to take between three and four hours. There are loads of commuter trains, and commuter buses from portlaoise. If you work on the western edge of the city, it's not a difficult commute at all. The thing is that people in ireland don't just commute to their jobs in Dublin, they commute to jobs everywhere. All the towns in Rural Ireland are filled with people who live in their home community, and travel to work in another town.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Was looking on daft.ie and manky 1/2 bedroom places with hardly any windows seem to start at 300k.

Labour have blood on their hands, they helped FG reinflate a property bubble.

How on earth is this supposed to work? I'm fascinated.

[Antepli Ejderha]

Is Nenagh where they make fire engines?

Applause.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Is Nenagh where they make fire engines?

Hobbes, this joke is as old as sirens. This is basically the first joke that about half of Irish children work out for themselves.

[Lang Spoon]

The supine Labour AG insisting (lying) any Rent Control would be unconstitutional is a start. They mightn’t have had any money to begin building social housing (and I’d double your figures Berba, considering how much existing stock will need torn down in Dublin) when they got in, but could have put the Development Plan down, ringfenced capital spending as the economy began the climb. But no votes in that for the Radical Left of Dublin Bay South.

[Duncan Gardner]

Culchie towns in Abba songs

Nenagh Pretty Ballerina
Monagh Monagh Monaghan
Ring Ring of Kerry
Andante Andandytown
Waterlooford
Loch Garman Garman Garman a man after Meath Naas

[anton pulisov]

Post-crash Ireland was the ideal opportunity to once and for all address the developer-led, semi-d free-for-all that is zoning, housing and transport infrastructure in Ireland.

Tell me what Labour did on improving things on that front AB, and I'll consider letting them off the hook. But the fact that nothing has changed and square one is fast re-approaching would suggest that not very much has been achieved.

[Lang Spoon]

A Labour Party that would give a ministerial position to Kevin fucking Humphreys is even more piss poor than the clapped out Third Way UK version at the time.

[Lang Spoon]

Kevin Humphreys who as junior minister for Education fought any moves toward educate together/cutting govt cash going to the fucking church/other parasitic fee paying schools, all coz he was worried about his true Irish Times taking and second home in Portugal base. Why not just join FG?

[Lang Spoon]

A quiet part of the Algarve of course, you wouldn’t have heard of it.

[Ek weet nie]

Is Nenagh where they make fire engines?

My favourite joke. Crowbarred into as many situations as possible. My poor wife shudders when she realizes what is coming.

[Lang Spoon]

It’s in no Govts interest to flood the market with supply though, is it? Not as long as people regard their gaff as a wealth generating asset, rather than a place to live and would riot if prices started falling deliberately.

[anton pulisov]

that's where the FGFFLab missed the trick in 2008, 09, 10, 11, 12

instead of burying the tiger they have revived it

[elguapo4]

Labour were eviscerated in the last election and will be lucky to have any TDs after the next one so you're kicking a corpse at this stage

[Lang Spoon]

Yeah they needed a Corbyn (hopefully younger) to revive them. Untainted by Coalition. The closest we have is fucking Boyd Barrett.

[Lang Spoon]

Or of course the triangulating between Radical leftism/pragmatic FF lite/Nu Labour with a Working Class emphasis Mary Lou Sinn Fein, they are lined up to disappoint as net junior coalition partners. And so the circle begins again.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Hold on for one minute. Until the last couple of months of the govt, the department of environment had its budget cut every year. also the budget of the department of the environment is tiny.

In 2015 The Irish govt had €51 billion in current expenditure, and €3.8 billion for capital expenditure. Social Welfare got 40% of the current expediture, Health got 25%, and Education got 16%. The Department of the environment had €850 million. Which is 1.6%. They received another €500 million for capital expenditure, which is 13% of the total. Add the two together and the Dept of Enviroment got €1.3 billion (about 2.2% of the total) now remember that this money has to cover so many different fucking things, from local govt, to water, to secondary roads, to.... and you start to see the scale of the problem, and while there are plans for building houses on paper, it actually requires spending quite a lot of money to progress any of them. The money to do this would have to be carved out of some other part of the department's budget. The other thing was that Phil Hogan had just fucked off to brussels, having wound up everyone into a murderous rage about water Charges. It was water charges every fucking day during that period.

Repairing the Burst bubble was going to be a ten year job. The First five years were going to be all about reconstructing the tax base, so it could support our level of spending. It was going to be all about stopping the bleeding, so we could get back to increasing the amount of money we were spending. The Second five years would have to be spent on repairing the damage, and focussing on new priorities. Instead everyone decided that we didn't need any of that. The time had come to punish the labour party for being thatcherites, so instead we got Simon Coveney, and Eoin Fucking murphy in charge of housing, the return of Fianna Fail, and everyone elected a load of independents in the hope of grabbing as much of the trickle of cash for their constituency. So instead of embarking on a second five year plan, we have this current bullshit, where no-one makes any decisions, the amount of money available is then ultimately squandered by giving the various different priorities an inadequate amount of money.

Blaming this mess on the labour party for not having put in place a plan to build a large amount of public sector housing by the time of the 2016 election kind of is entirely divorced from what was happening at the time, or that literally nothing has happened since even though there is for the first time extra money to start doing important things. All that has happened since is that Irish water has effectively collapsed, and the extra money that might have gone towards public housing is shoved into that. While Eoin Murphy wrings his hands, until the last person in his constitucncy is finally out of negative equity.

it's also worth considering what is the likely effect of introducing rent controls in a time of severe shortages, in both the rental market, and the permanent market. If you introduce measures that effectively mean that the value of the asset is rising faster than the rental income, then you're going to sell the rental property to someone who wants to live there permanently, and the supply of properties to rent will collapse. The issue is the shortage. The thing that makes all of this so fucking hard is that 70% of households own their own home. a lot of the people in the remaining 30% see themselves as one day having a house, so the number of people who are going to remain in rental accomodation permanently are a small minority of people whose interests run directly opposite to the interests of everyone else. That's the real fucking problem.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

that's where the FGFFLab missed the trick in 2008, 09, 10, 11, 12

instead of burying the tiger they have revived it

Ah come on. You do know that in those years we were borrowing 12% of GDP every year to cover the hole in our tax revenues. That's how we went bankrupt.

And what is happening now is nothing like the celtic tiger, because instead of us building 80,000 houses a year, we're building less than 8,000. Instead of Banks lending huge amounts of money, most purchases are either for cash or mostly for cash. It's a completely different thing.

[Lang Spoon]

We are building a shit ton of office blocks prepping for Brexit (some almost Talls really coming on at Docklands). But fuck all
Mixed use. Who the fuck will ever live there? It will be a desert at night, all sterile bars and eateries that lose their crowd with the last train/bus/last pint the fat boss will risk). And where is any social or “affordable housing”? Even cash fucked Glasgow Housing Associations (council stock was privatized as a New Labour Think the Unthinkable experiment), city chambers and Holyrood are looking at 30000 such “affordable”/social/mid market rent new gaffs over the next 5 years. Though I think that includes CPOs of private slumlord sandstone tenements to be renovated.