Music.

I'm your host, Kirill Mulqueen, and today in episode 34, I'm talking to Lorkhan Sir, who is a senior lecturer and housing policy and analyst and an all-round expert on housing.

So, are house prices going to crash?

Why isn't supply bringing prices down?

And could we actually run out of water and electricity from housing delivery, dodgy data to ageing infrastructure and the working homeless.

This is one of my most sobering and important podcast episodes yet.

If you're trying to buy, rent or just stay sane in the Irish housing market, you need to hear this.

Okay, now in today's episode, I have Dr.

Lorcan Sir on again.

Third time on the podcast, Lorcan, no one has even been on twice, but this is your Hattrick.

Yeah, it must be cheap or easy or something, Ciarán.

Both, yeah.

The episodes always get really good numbers and you are so good at just explaining things in ways that people can understand given your job as well.

That's a helpful skill to have.

So we'll get straight into it.

Where are house prices going?

Because this is, I get asked this, I don't know how many times a day, every day and people are saying, well, I might hold off because I think house prices are going to crash because This is all feeling very 2007 again.

And I'm like, oh, it's not the same.

It's totally different.

But so our house price has gone to crash, in your opinion.

Yeah, well, the first thing to say is you're right.

Like, it's not the same as 2007.

2007 was all about extending credit, like giving people 100%, 100%, 110% mortgages and borrow up to a zoo and all that kind of stuff, right?

It's not that we put a, you know, the central bank would come down strong on that.

So we have our four times cap or whatever it is for first-time buyers, all that kind of stuff.

So it's not about that, but prices, like my good instinct is that prices are going to keep going up.

And actually, government policy is doing nothing to counter that, really.

A lot of government policy, nearly admitted that they want prices to keep going, but maybe at a more sustainable rate of inflation, if you know what I mean, 2% or 3% a year.

And there are prime ministers, like countries like ours, the angle sphere of countries, like there are prime ministers in other countries, like in Australia, for example, but where they've come out explicitly and said, you know, we want house prices to keep rising.

Because if you think about it, like at a fundamental level, the people who deliver most sales in your private builders, they only build when prices are rising.

Like what builder's going to build when prices are falling you know what i mean it wouldn't be much of a builder so it's in order to keep them in the game these days we need to keep prices going up or at least keep their profits going up yeah and a lot of that comes from taxpayer subsidies helps buy for example that's a straight transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the to the builder um but it keeps the prices up and it keeps them rolling along and that's what government kind of want but there's other reasons why prices are going to keep going up and you know a lot of people have put their eggs in the supply is going to bring down prices uh basket and that doesn't really work to be honest because as soon as prices start to plateau or to fall supply dries up so you don't really get that but there are kind of five things that that when i turn this into an extra right there's five real basic things that influence house prices and the first one is people having babies so young people like yourself and a couple of kids and all that and it's wonderful you know people going to have kids because we need loads of kids because down the line older people like need younger people working, paying their taxes to help pay their pension and all that kind of stuff so people having kids and demographic change in our population is now about 5.28 million at the moment so the more people we have the more housing we're going to need and it's not smaller housing because Ireland.

Your kids are going to live with you until they're nearly 30 right so it's not a smaller house you need like it's a bigger house for longer is what people need really so the demographics is the first one, the second one is immigration so people coming into the country net immigration so minus the people who leave the people who come in um and even excluding things like ukraine and that you know we saw a hundred thousand people kind of flood into the country very quickly we have had we've had continuous net immigration so more people are coming into the country than leaving so they bring with them you know their own needs and they're quite often they're not babies coming into the country they're adults or couples and they need housing and typically they're coming in to a relatively good job, So, you know, they'll want to either rent somewhere or to buy somewhere increasingly.

So that's the third reason.

Wages is a big driver, right?

So every 1% increase in wages that people get across the board, you know, on average, is going to see a 2% rise in house prices.

Because if you think about it, Cairn, you go to the bank, and I've got more money in my salary than I did last year, so I can borrow more, right?

If I can borrow more, I can go out and pay more for the house, right?

So there's that side of things so wages so the public sector people got I don't know what is it 10.25% over two and a half years or something like that, that's going to put more people's money put more money in people's pockets so they can go to the bank and say I need to borrow more to buy a house and out we all go competing against each other with more money, and the private sector also like are going to get something like four and a half percent rise this year the IIT I bet reckon so that's going to translate into a 9% increase If you want to go like that, it gives you more money to borrow.

So what have you done?

Demographics, immigration, and wages.

The next big one is interest rates.

So the more interest rates come down, the more you can borrow because your repayments get cheaper.

So people, thanks, will look at your repayment capacity every month and say, well, he doesn't have to pay as much this month in repayments, so we'll give him more money so we can borrow more money.

So the interest rates are the big ones.

So every 1% decrease in an interest rate, say from 4% to 3%, is a 3% rise in house prices.

And we saw yesterday, the day before, whatever, the ECB reduced interest rates by 0.25%.

And they've been continuously reducing them.

Yeah, I think that's the eighth decrease since last summer, I think.

Yeah, so whatever it was last summer, today, I don't really keep track of it, but whatever it is, you can multiply that by two, that reduction, and that goes straight into house prices, people can afford more.

So that's demographics, immigration, what do they say, wages, interest rates.

So the ECB, if that gets, they have to be passed on by the domestic banks here, but they most often are, or if you've got, say, a new entrant into the market, you know, an online bank or something came in and offered really cheap mortgages, like that would allow people to borrow more money.

And then the final one is supply you know and an increase a one percent increase in supply should lead to a two percent decrease in house prices all things being equal as the economy say right cedar is paris and i'm not an economist but things are never equal because as always people having babies dying leaving the country coming into the country getting new jobs getting more money getting less money whatever because never things and things are never equal so supply is actually quite a minor part of the whole equation about the impact on house prices and we see this from the Bank of England and our own central bank have all done studies on the impact of supply on house prices and it's negligible.

It's like 1 or 2% whether it's a small one.

So all those things put them all in the pocket and you end up, I don't see a scenario where house prices are going to go down this year.

And it could be a 10 to 12, 15% increase that we see happening.

So that's, that's unfortunately where where i see things going well you know unfortunately i say if you're a young person or house or looking to buy a house but if you're a mover or if you're you know if you're someone who's got equity in your house i want more equity or going on to do something else you know it's happy day yeah it can be but like like i know my own house has gone up in value just given what's going on around me and the houses are going for insane when you compare it to what we paid and at the time when we bought our house it was the most expensive house ever bought in this area and it was quickly beaten in about two weeks after that um but then let's say mine's worth more that's not really much use to me because the next thing if i'm looking because we like we have two kids and it's a very small house and i think we'd be fine but you know i'm always looking at this stuff and i'm thinking well what if we wanted somewhere bigger but in order for me in order for us to get somewhere bigger in around here it's it's it's way more than our house has increased in value if you get me.

And then because we borrow to our maximum, there's not much extra wiggle room there because our wages haven't gone up.

We're both teachers, so our wages are going up very, very little.

So it doesn't really benefit me.

And I guess it's probably benefiting people more that bought at a time when prices were rock bottom, like say 12, 13 years ago.

And for them, they've got massive of equity.

But even still, everything's inflated onto the next one.

Let's just recap those five things.

We've got immigration, which we know.

There's so many people.

We've got basically record low unemployment, don't we?

I think we're at full employment, I think, technically.

We're pretty much at full employment here, 4%.

Yeah, so we've full employment with immigration coming in.

And point two was then the demographics.

Demographics is number one.

people have a kiss.

Immigration, people coming into the country, 99% of them to work.

And quite often in high-paid jobs, you know, the pharma and the finance and tech.

Number three then was wages.

Number four is the ECB or interest rates.

And then number five is supply.

Okay, so it's looking pretty bleak for people trying to buy a house at the moment.

You make a good point there, though, about...

So I'm in the same situation.

I have an ex-corporal house here in Dublin, 1929, built by Crampton.

All that stuff right and it's doubled in value easily since i bought it anyway if not more it's paper paper money though you know it's not money that i can access really and it's not money i want to access it's just the bricks and mortar that i that that we live in you know and you're you're you're in the same boat i'd say um so it's kind of paper money away unless you want to move and so you know you can release that equity and and have that money but then like you say if you want a bigger house particularly in the same area you're going to spend commensurately the same do you know that kind of way that all that equity that you've got in your current house is absorbed into the next one so it makes it kind of makes it kind of tricky now the the only thing is kieran for people like you and me is that and everybody who's got lucky enough to have a house with a bit of equity in it if we wanted to move say to curless or sligo you got a job as a school principal in letter kenny you'd be quince in because you'd probably buy a house and have no mortgage you know and i'd be something similar if i moved to tipper area or if i moved to somewhere like that.

That's the only advantage.

But if you and I live kind of inner city-ish, and if we wanted to remain in the inner city, the trade-off is small house close to work, bigger house, it's like the Father Ted thing, small close, far away, you know.

That's really what it comes down to you.

Okay, right.

So we've established prices aren't going to come down anyway.

And it's something people always say to me, and I'm like, they're hoping for prices to collapse or to crash.

And I keep trying to explain to them if that happens you likely won't be able to get a mortgage anyway because it'll be back to where we were where people couldn't get mortgages or they're being really strict or people had no jobs and all that.

It's not something that people should be wishing for but I can understand people's frustration because prices are just getting away from them.

I was even chatting to somebody the other day, a pal of mine, and they're living rent free so they're not paying any rent and And he's saying, well, we're thinking about buying a house, but the amount they're saving each month isn't even keeping up with where prices are going.

Which is insane.

So they're literally living around free.

So all of their income coming in, they've no kids, all their income coming in is going straight into the bank and it's still not keeping up with the inflation of prices around them.

It's a good point there about people wanting things to crash.

Crash has happened for a reason.

And if you're lucky enough to be in the public sector or civil servant, the chances are if there's a crash, you'll probably keep your job.

You might take a pay cut, but you'll keep your job like the last time.

But you're in the private sector, there's a chance that the economy is tanking overall.

So banks are going to close the door straight away.

So the house prices might come down, but so might your job.

So it's a really kind of tricky balancing act.

And part of it is because we don't have any other options in Ireland.

If you have a job, if you earn more than whatever, there's 40 grand a year, whatever the limit for social housing is, you're stuck in with the sharks in the tank.

When everybody else, you know, they're looking for private housing because we don't have that buffer of like they do in other countries.

of affordable housing.

So people earning up to, say, 100 grand a year would be living in estate-provided accommodation quite happily and nobody would bat an eyelid.

You wouldn't even know.

And we don't have that.

We have very strict cut-offs between social housing provided by the state or the council or you're in the tank with all the sharks in the private housing sector.

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Now back to the podcast.

Exactly, yeah.

And it's a very small tank because of this very few, available for people to buy.

So it's probably a good segue on to my next question, which is a kind of like a snapshot as to where we are in Ireland at the moment when it comes to housing delivery.

Because I know you put together some figures for me before for the stats for 2023 and the number of homes that actually became available for sale.

Because in the run-up to the election, you hear all these figures thrown around, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 homes being built.

And people think then that's 30,000 homes and the government, I always think it's funny because they come out and they say we've built 30,000 as if they've built them, they haven't built any but so few of those 30,000 and I'm repeating myself all the time to people so few of those 30,000 or 32,000 homes are actually available for you or me to buy they're broken down into built to rent they're broken down into social they're broken down into one-off houses, self-builds or whatever And then we've got a small pool to dump into that shark tank with.

So what's the kind of state of where we're at now?

Do you have figures for 2024?

Yeah, so you're spot on there.

A lot of people don't realize that, like, of all the houses built every year, a decreasing, it's not even, you know, a decreasing proportion of them are coming.

And when I say to the market, I mean in your local D&G, Sherry Fisch, Gerald, Mason, whatever your local estate agent is, right, coming to their window as here's an opportunity to buy a brand new house okay and we're delighted to present to the market these 62 houses or whatever it is right every year there's fewer and fewer of those coming to the market or declining proportion so even back to not that long 2017 about half of all the houses that we built and we weren't building a whole lot in first but about half all the houses we built would come to your local estate agent window as a new house and an opportunity for you to go down and buy last year and the year before that was about 28%.

So that's about out of 30,300 houses that we built last year, that's about 8,500 houses.

The rest, as you say, are council houses, social houses, which are grand.

One-off houses, and that's typically about 5,500 houses every year.

People who build their own house, typically on family land, but not always, but mostly on family land.

And you know, the bungalow or the mansion or whatever they build.

That doesn't go to the market because that's for them, right?

But the average size of a house in rural Ireland is quite big.

It's 230 square meters like two and a half thousand square feet they're quite large and there's like two of them rattling around in it like with pine kitchen and pine floorboards and pine doors and they spent all the money on the house and the landscape is bagged the cement just sitting around the front for 10 years then but there's all that kind of crack right so I went to actually just on that I called down to a friend a friend of mine built a house down as you said on family land down in Kilkenny I called down last week I brought my daughter down for a play date and she even during the build and stuff she was always saying to me you know but it's so small.

And I said, what size is it?

It's like, it's a hundred and 180 square meter.

It's like, that's double the size of my house.

Do you know how insulting it is that you keep saying how small this house is?

It's literally double the size of my house.

But as she said, but everyone down here just builds big, huge houses.

Yeah, because they can, because they're saving on buying the site.

So they're 300 grand, right?

It's going to go far, far, farther than our 300 grand in Dublin, you know?

And this house I'm sitting in here, right, was built by the corporal in 1929.

These houses were all built at 64 square meters right and these are in the days when there was no contraception anything so people were having i know from my neighbors fair right you know they were having eight nine ten kids in three bedroom tiny houses you know i'm sitting with this what was the scullery or the kitchen you know and uh that they were tiny but they just threw the kids out the street the kids played hail rain or sign out in the streets all day and now we're looking at like it's three times the size of that house like is you know down the country 230 240 square I mean, there's this huge house, like, you know.

But anyway, yeah, so there's 5,500 adults every year, right?

And not everybody builds a huge one, but most of them do.

And then, and I know as it gets worse, as you go up to the Northwest and Donegal, like, they're all huge.

So up there, but anyway.

So 5,500 adults, right?

And council houses.

And then there's a huge, a big takeoff, and particularly since Coveney turbocharged the back in the day, is the built-in rent.

So the proliferation of apartments by the Kenley Wilsons, Grace Towers, Ires Reeds, all those guys who are building houses, are building apartments only for rent.

And they're quite expensive so they're only for the highest earners and then whatever gets left over is typically private housing or sale so that's a real problem I think and like private housing for sale has been displaced by particularly apartments for rent because it's more profitable.

Hugely profitable, but it's incentivized.

They don't pay tax on the rent coming in, which is disgraceful, really.

But also, it runs contrary to what people want in Ireland.

And I'm not just speculating in that, like this Department of Housing research that shows that over 80% of people who are currently renting want to be homeowners.

And yet the government are out trying to incentivize institutional investment to come into Ireland to build more expensive apartments for rent.

I mean, to me, that's bizarre housing policy, really.

the focus should be on getting people out of the private rental sector who don't want to be there and into housing that they want to own.

And that's really where we're...

And the homeownership thing isn't a post-famine hang-up, right?

And we're all hung up on homeownership.

There's just basic economic common sense here at a societal level, right?

The reason homeownership has been promoted for over the decades, it was two.

One is, you know, Catholicism, conservatism.

We won't go into that at the moment.

But the other one is that when people own their own homes, we can retire at 65 or 66 or whatever age we're going to be caring when we retire, right?

And we can live on a modest state pension, 240 euro a week or whatever it is, right?

So that doesn't cost the state a whole lot because we don't have a mortgage to pay.

Our mortgage will coincidentally expire at the date we retire, right?

And so therefore, the 1,000, the 2,000, whatever you're paying a month in your mortgage, goes as your wages have, right?

So then you can live on the state pension, you know, if you get the state pension.

So people can live on a modest income, which is great.

If you have people, and there's an increasing proportion of people who are in retirement, proportionate terms who are renting, they are buggered, right?

So what's going to happen then is like you're on your 40, 50, 60 grand a year, you retire, you're living on a state pension, and you're still looking for a 16, 17 hundred euro a month in rent.

And you can't afford that.

So what happens?

The state is going to have to step in and subsidize that.

So it's going to take this emphasis on the rental sector.

is going to cost the taxpayer an absolute fortune.

And I'm not talking in 30 years' time, I'm talking in like five to 10 years' time.

Yeah, it's a serious time bomb that has been ticking for a while.

And the whole pension time bomb, which is why they're trying to bring in auto-enrollment, which I don't know when that's ever actually going to come in.

I don't think they even have a provider for it yet, but a time bomb's been ticking for a long time.

But there's another thing, and you did an article about it as well.

Because we know we keep hearing we need more and more supply, which we obviously do.

But the main thing I get back in from people is, well, how are we going to build these homes that we need because we don't have the trades, we don't have the number of people necessary to build these things.

But you mentioned in your article as well about water as well and the water supply.

So could you expand on that one a little bit?

Yeah.

The trades thing, right?

You need, just, we'll start with the trades thing, right?

Because the metric that you're looking for is about two workers for every new house, right?

So if you were to build 50,000 a year, you need 100,000 workers.

There's far more construction sector workers in the country than that.

The issue is a lot of them are building other things.

They're building data centers, they're building logistics warehouses, they're building hotels, they're building all sorts of things that are arguably less important than housing, right?

Now, not all the skills are transferable, but a lot of them are.

So we do have a good very good size construction sector there we might have all the skills we have a lot of it there the problem is they're doing other things right now more fundamental than that is that to build a house no matter where you build it right but particularly or in the urban areas you need water in and you need water right otherwise it's not a house so we have a real problem with our water supply uh in ireland generally because the average age of a water piping under 75 years old and a lot of them are a lot older than a huge amount of them are really leaking something like 62 000 kilometers of pipes there's a huge amount of pipes around the place.

And they're leaking uh like a government back then shall we put in the article there a lot of leakage so the leakage rate was 47 in 2018 it's now down to 37 and the plan is to get it to 25 by 2030 so in a few in a few years time uh the problem there is is also it's not just the leakage but it also means that we're using a huge amount so we use 1.7 billion liters we am we draw down 1.7 billion liters of water every day right but our usage is actually quite average across europe which means we're drawing down the second highest amount per capita in europe but we're using the average so we're losing all that water in between do you know what i mean taking down a lot but not using a lot so we're losing the water in the greater dublin area so that's dublin wicklow mead and kildare we're at about 98 water capacity so one good episode of on 8th Street and every Wednesday to put on the kettle during the break and there might be like little snow water at the tap you know we're at that level of precarity you know we're that close to the edge there so where is all the water going to come from for the 50,000 houses because Ishka Air and Irish Water say they can only supply water to about 30 or 35,000 houses a year right which is only 70 percent of what the government say they want to build so there's a huge issue with getting water in right then there's the pipeline from the Parateen Basin in the Shannon to draw water up to Dublin, 350 million litres a day.

So we're using 590 or something million litres of water a day in the Greater Dublin area.

And they want to add 350, 350 million to it.

People in Tipperary are saying, that's our water.

Take your hands off it.

And I'm not going to go there on that one, but it's not necessarily your water.

So that's the water in, right?

But even that will just keep our head above water because remember, the more people have babies, the population is, yeah, literally.

The more people, you know, the demand is growing.

We want more housing.

So that's only going to keep us going.

But the other side of the equation is, right, It's all very well having water coming into the house.

You also need to get rid of your wastewater.

And we have huge issues down the road here.

Ringsend is that capacity.

So where is all the water going to be processed?

And already, like today, was it today or yesterday, in the newspaper, nobody can swim now down in Clontarf because of all the sewage that got dumped into Clontarf there accidentally.

This kind of stuff has happened all the time.

But the last 30 years, we have...

I was just about to say.

Yeah, we've breached it every year for 30 years, the EU waste water treatment directive.

Down the country, so we've nowhere to process the waste.

The wastewater down the country, the issue there is that a lot of people have maybe half a million septic tanks in the country, and there's over 56% of them are leaking.

And when I say leaking, it doesn't mean like, it's literally leaking crap into the ground.

The ground water then goes into the well, and the well goes into your house.

So we have a huge issue, because a lot of people don't even know where the septic tank is, and they don't bother getting it cleaned out.

So we have huge wastewater treatment issues as well.

On the supply side, most of the water in the Greater Dublin area, 80% of it comes from the Bartree Reservoir and the River Liffey.

85% of the water in Dublin City comes from the River Liffey.

It gets treated and leaks up and then gets spread out there.

In the west of Ireland, where the demand for water is less, it rains more.

So they have more water where they don't need it in the west of Ireland.

And then there's less rain and less water happening in the east of the country where we need it most.

So one good warm few weeks and the river, you know, the drop, the level drops in the river Liffey and we find an awful lot of reduced pressure in your taps or hosepipe bands, you know.

And that's, yeah, that's why we keep getting the hosepipe band.

So that's, right.

Okay.

So basically the irony of us being an island, but we don't have enough water.

A wet country with no water.

Yeah.

You know, it's mad.

And then the other side of that, Una Buckley is the Secretary General in the department of, I can't remember one of those departments, came out last week and said, like, we're facing a situation pretty soon on the electricity front, where it might be either AI, as in data centers, or housing, right?

So we're in the situation where we're all, well, I'm not, but it doesn't seem madly in love with data centers, even though they employ very few people.

They're madly in love with the data centers and want to bend over backwards to keep the Yanks happy with the data centers, but that could come at the cost of not having enough electricity in the grid to meet new housing demand.

And so that's an issue as well.

At the core of this, Cairn, it comes back to governments over the years not willing to spend money on water or infrastructure.

And partly it's the same in housing, but the water one in particular, Irish water was obviously teed up to be privatized.

They thought that they'd be able to hive that off and some English company would come in and charge us all for water and upgrade all the tanks didn't happen because of all the protests.

In the UK, sorry, in England, all the water is privatized.

And now what you see there is directors creaming it with their remuneration and their money.

Shareholders making shed loads of money.

Worst sewage leaks and worse water supply issues and cleanliness problems.

So privatization has been a total disaster in England.

And it didn't happen here.

So now the government are stuck with Ishka Aaron or the water infrastructure that they didn't think they'd be stuck with, but they are.

And I don't think there's many policies that you'd ever want to take from the UK to be honest like they're not really a good benchmark for people to be copying from but we tend to we tend to copy and paste a lot of what they do, we do and Simon Harris came out there recently and said, said that water charges aren't going to happen under this government he also promised we'd get 40,000 houses last year, so I don't know whether you'd take him out as a word or not you wouldn't know he's not going to be around forever anyway in politics so you wouldn't know what would happen they also promised they'd get rid of the USC about 20 years ago or whenever they were pushing but anyway this is all very you can't really believe, this is all very depressing Lorcan so the prices are going up we've no water we've no electricity have you any good news for people.

Well, look, you know, it's really hard.

I mean, if you're in the lucky position of being a homeowner, and even if you're kind of up to your, you know, up to your neck and paying the mortgage every month, like really, the value of your house is going up a considerable amount.

It's not really much good to you unless you want to move down the country.

And a lot of people have done that and did that during COVID.

I hate being flippant about the housing sector and saying, you know, it's not as bad as you think.

Because when you look at, let's say, the homeless numbers and you look at that stuff, that's awful.

And there's a huge proportion of people who are homeless who are working.

You know, that's the really, really odd thing.

Because you'd naturally assume that people who are homeless, there's a problem, they have a problem, they have a social problem or they're unemployed or they're no money or whatever.

But an awful lot of them are hardworking people.

that people who do, you wouldn't recognize them, people who make the, you know, make the sandwich and spar for you or whatever.

There are people doing ordinary jobs and trying to keep going in life.

You know, raising two or three kids in a hotel room on your own, I'd say Prozac probably keeps these homeswomen going because it's a hard, hard life.

I was in France last year speaking at a cultural festival in the north of France and they brought me over to bring a bit of misery to the Irish dance.

And so we did, we showed them a documentary and I'd recommend everybody watch this.

It's a movie actually called Rosie and it's about a home with someone and our partner and three kids in in dublin and it's a couple of days in our life and the french people so there's 130 people in the islands or whatever it is and the french people are there and france is not a perfect country as they will be the first to admit, and these kinds of questions afterwards so they showed the movie for an hour and a bit or whatever it is and then they had the discussion with me and they're just asking like you're a wealthy country you're technologically advanced you know what are you doing wrong here like well what's the issue that you just keep making bags of everything despite having loads of money.

We're like, you know, like teenagers who win the lotto.

We just don't know what to do or do the right thing with it, you know.

So, and they were really surprised.

And then the Lord Mayor of the town was coming up to me afterwards and he's saying, you know, I'm a communist.

I knew you was a communist.

And he was telling me how it works in that town where all planning applications go to him and he just tells them what to build.

They showed him the location.

He says, you can build 12 houses there, four of them are for the town and eight of them you can have yourself.

You know, and that's the way it works.

It's just much more state intervention, I suppose, and less reliance on the sector.

But the French people just couldn't get over it.

They were in awe of the issues here.

So everybody, go and watch the movie Rosie.

There you go.

It's worth it.

Okay, Rosie.

And where can they see it?

I don't know.

Paddy Bratton, the director, he did it.

You'll find it somewhere.

Yeah.

I show it to my students every year to take them down after paying up real estate and investment and all that stuff and just show them this is what the other side of housing is like.

kid.

Whenever I post about you being on the podcast, I tend to get messages from your students or students or past students always singing your praises.

So that's always as a teacher myself.

As a teacher I know how difficult it is to get any praise from students.

I'm sure there's lots of them giving out about me as well.

A lot of real estate and particularly when you're in the business of education a lot of it is investment driven and profit doing and that's a kind of a soft lefty kind of idea i try to bring a little bit of balance to it sort of you know we do stuff on social housing we do a lot on housing actually we're bringing a lot of housing into the province doing a lot of data into problems because what you find over the years is that an awful lot of ordinary punters and you know the likes of your your followers and listeners and all that would have been a hoodwinked over the years by government ministers coming out with all sorts of dodgy data and all sorts of really dodgy statistics and even now like you know the homeless numbers are released at two o'clock on the last friday of a month.

You know, it's all obfuscation.

It's all kind of hiding the information.

The social housing completion numbers every year are you know, they just about released of me, you know.

And then you have to go through them to work out what county builds.

Like they do it in a deliberately confusing kind of a way.

So we're bringing data into the courses now to show students where to go and find accurate data and how to manipulate it or how to use it and analyse it and all that stuff.

Happy days.

And people can check out, it's TUD, isn't it?

TUD.ie?

T.U.

Dublin yeah T.U.

Dublin we're hoping to start one of the things we're missing in Ireland and you as educators know the value of degrees and qualifications and all that kind of stuff but we don't really have a practical housing course in Ireland, so we're hoping to start one next year a postgrad in housing I don't know what we call it applied housing or something like that where we'll do the actual nuts and bolts of here's a field deliver me housing you know rather than the theory of the history of housing we'll cover a little bit of that as well, but we want to show people what it is to actually find a site.

Get planning, do the community consultation, do the money.

This is what we're going to build the front of us in construction.

This is how the money is going to work.

This is how we're going to sell it or keep it or whatever we're going to do.

That sounds fantastic.

I look forward to seeing a little bit more about that.

We'll sign you up, Gern.

Yeah, I have enough jobs, but yeah, that would be great.

Listen, thanks so much for coming on the podcast again, Lorcan.

Really appreciate it.

You're welcome, Ciarán.

It's always a pleasure to have a chat with you.

August, Sinead, Lehigh on episode shut of the Crazy House Prizes podcast.

Thanks again to Lorcan for joining me.

He's always brutally honest, but extremely informative.

I really wish every single person in the country listened to his housing analysis.

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Sláonga po.