Music.

Dave, August Falter Arash to the Crazy House Prices podcast with me, Ciarán Mulqueen.

Today, I am talking with Lorcan Sir, who is Senior Housing Lecturer in TUD.

And we're going to chat a little bit about his article in the Irish Times recently, which goes through the statistics and the number of homes that actually become available for sale, whether it's apartments or houses.

And just a bit of a spoiler alert, it's only around 4% of what was built in Dublin City was actually available for people to buy.

the rest was built to rent and the rest was social.

So it's a reason why and the main reason why house prices keep going up where they are.

I just went through the figures for the last six months for all homes, not just new homes.

But in Dublin, the median price was €508,000 for buying a house and nationwide, excluding Dublin, was €318,000.

So prices are just going through the roof, as you all know.

If you're listening to this, you're well aware of that.

So it's a really good chat with Lorcan.

We talk about everything from housing policy, apartment building, house building, why we can't build anything, why everything's so expensive.

We even talk a little bit about lobbyists, log cabins and all of that.

So it's a really good chat and let's get into it.

Now Lorcan Sir, welcome back onto the Crazy House Prices podcast.

Thanks for taking the time out today.

You have a really good article in the Irish Times today about numbers and figures in terms of Dublin City and there's a little bit about Cork there as well in terms of who's buying what.

Would you be able to talk us through that a little bit?

Yeah, good to be on with you again, Ciarán.

So what I went to do, I'm always curious because the government are always saying like we built 30,000 houses or we built whatever, 33,000 houses or whatever it is every year and they're kind of posting about that.

That's all going on.

But the devil is in the detail with all the things.

So I'm really interested in, of all those houses that we build every year, how many of them appear for sale for first-time buyers or movers or anybody, right?

All these new houses.

And back in about 2017, about half of all the houses that we built became available for sale.

So in other words, they appeared in your local state nature window, right?

And you could go down and put a deposit on and buy a new house.

That was in 2017.

So not that long ago, you know, seven of us, that eight years ago.

Now that's down to, well, last year was 33%.

The year before, it was 28%.

And it's only 33%, but it only rose last year because apartments went down.

So what remained became a greater proportion of the total output, you know what I mean?

So, there's very little, like there's less than one in three of all new houses are appearing for sale.

So, where are the rest of them is the obvious question.

And the rest of them are made up of one-off houses.

So, that's typically rural housing.

People are building a house for themselves.

So, they're building a house for themselves.

So, it's never going to go in the state.

It's sold.

So, you'll never see it in the state.

I wonder if that's fine.

That's always in around 18, 19, 20% of houses.

And then the rest of them are social housing.

So, council housing include housing, body houses.

And then there's investors, landlords, you know, people, basically landlords, corporate landlords or small landlords buying up housing.

And what has happened over the years is that as the numbers of the councils and approved housing bodies, they bought more housing and the investors bought more housing.

The amount available the remainder available for ordinary people to buy has shrunk huge what's the word shrunk uh a huge amount you know total there's less and less out there so that's all very well so then i'm kind of looking at well you know in the big cities how many are available have been available to to kind of buy because the big cities is where the house price action is you know so i went and i looked at say dublin and i discovered if you look at the say the four local authorities of Dublin, Dunnery, Radown, South Dublin, Singal and Dublin City.

What you find last year, we built about 11,000, just under 11,000 new houses were built.

That's great.

The problem is that out of all those, the apartments that were built there, only 8% of them were sold, and only just over half of all what they call scheme houses, basically estate houses.

Were sold.

So the rest of it all went to investors and to councillors and approved housing bodies.

In Dublin City, right, for the last three years in Dublin City, 95% of all new housing has been apartments.

And of course, 95% of that is for rent, right, either for social renting, council renting, or for investments for the large funds.

So out of the 3,350 new houses and homes we call them built in Dublin City last year, 111 apartments were sold.

That's it.

So there's over 3,000 apartments built, 3,100 something, right?

And only 111 of those were sold, right?

And out of all the houses that were built, 44 houses were sold in Dublin City last year, right?

You get into Cork.

So hold on, just stop there.

So, of all the houses, I'll say homes to include apartments and houses.

So of all the homes built, only around about, so of 3,000, over 3,350 in Dublin City, only around 150 were or 455 yeah so out of the 3,350 new homes in dublin city last year 155 were sold to households right which is a kind of like four four percent or even less maybe yeah a tiny proportion of all the new housing right which is not great if you're from dublin and want to stay near your family or where you work or all that kind of stuff and you're in a cork right and cork last year, Cork City, they built 313 new apartments.

Of those 313, nine were sold to households, right?

It gets worse.

Out of your stay in Cork City, they built 856 new estate houses, right?

Scheme houses are called by the CSO.

We call them, yeah, typical.

Like loads of people in Ireland, like myself, grew up in housing states, so estate houses.

So out of the 856, 44 were sold to households, right?

It's absolutely like scandalously low amounts of numbers.

So because the houses are being snapped up by everybody else, you know, the states and everybody else.

And states isn't competing.

Like you have approved housing bodies competing with the land of Almond Agency, competing with the council to buy these kind of houses.

And they're paying, you know, through the notice of them.

And of course, because there's so little housing coming to the market, the prices are getting to rocket, right?

So across County Dublin, like the four local authorities, the kind of median price for a new house paid last year was €475,000, right?

Which is nearly half a million.

It's quite a lot.

And for anybody moving a house, they paid 600,000, but we just focus on the new housing.

And in Dublin City, then, what you have is the median price of a new home bought in Dublin City, right?

So median is kind of like the average, not going to be average, but the median was 850,000 euro for a new home in Dublin City, right?

That was 630,000 if you bought a new house.

So that's probably what you're going to have paid last year.

And 875,000 euro if you bought one of those 111 new apartments that came for sale in Dublin City last year.

So the apartments were, so people are paying 800 and all grand for an apartment.

875,000 euro for a new apartment.

So only 111 were sold, but the median price was 811.

So if you take that 875, right, last year, in 2017, the equivalent price in Dublin City was 420.

So they've more than doubled in eight years, right?

And the 630 for a house last year in Dublin City in 2017, that was 369,000.

So despite output rocketing or, you know, going up, prices are also going up hugely and really fast.

So that's, that's it.

Like all the accounts will tell you, if, you know, if supply goes up, price will come down, of course.

That doesn't work.

Only if you can buy them.

Yeah, well, they have to be there.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So they're not there.

And that's the crux of it.

Like nine out of ten new apartments that we build don't come available to, you know, people who listen to this podcast.

They don't come available for those people to be able to buy.

And yes, like for me, the really disconcerting thing, given all those figures, right, is that the government, like Simon Harris last week and Michal Martin this week, folks saying, oh, we need the private sector, the private sector, the private sector.

And the focus has to be on apartments.

And you're kind of going, hang on a second, why?

They don't come for sale.

Are you here to go and make policy for investors?

Are you here to make policy for Irish households?

And it seems to me it's very much geared towards investors and not towards households.

And then the other thing to do, of course, is reduce the standards.

So now you can have buildings full of one beds, and there's a whole move to remove balconies off most of them, all that kind of petty nonsense.

That doesn't really save a whole lot.

So the only options are small apartments, reduced standards for rent, right?

That's the only options in these areas.

So what happens then, of course, is that people aren't stupid.

They know they can't bring up a family in these small apartments.

You look around, Cairn, and you see all these new apartment blocks.

What do you see on the balconies?

Bikes, clothes drying, all that kind of stuff.

Kids' toys, which would suggest to me that the size and the way the apartments are fitted out already are not suitable.

They're already inadequate.

I don't like it.

Like in Europe, in a normal apartment block in Europe, whether it was built a hundred years ago, whether it's recently built, they have like those storage units underground.

They have, everybody has like, kind of like their own little shed.

Cause I've been in the, cause my in-laws lived all around Europe.

And, um, and you just see the difference in storage, the difference in build.

It's vastly different to apartments that are built here.

Well, I used to live in Sweden.

So the apartment block I did in Stockholm was four stories high and on the ground floor lived a retired soldier.

And he was still only like 50, right?

And he lived there, cheap rent, but he looked after the place.

He could be in parcels or post and looked after.

And in the basement then was a thing called a tvedstund, which was basically a laundrette with, can I say, three commercial washers or two commercial washers and two dryers.

And you put a pin in the board and say, Lorcan's sign was six to eight on a third of the evening or whatever it was, right?

And, you know, if you hadn't got your washing taken out by eight o'clock, they'd do it for you.

That kind of stuff.

But also you had these cages, which are maybe two metres by two metres.

And that was for your child's buggy, your skis, and of course Sweden, your winter fires, your summer fires, whatever.

All that crap can't have in the apartment.

We do none of that, you know, and we're determined to make this apartment.

So what we're doing is we're making them smaller, so we're making them.

But you'll get more rent per square meter, but we're actually making them less.

So Orla Hegarty on RTE Brainstorm there this week did a good piece, and she has analysed, like, what you'll get with these new regulations.

You'll actually house fewer people in a block, but you'll get much more rent, and that's what it seems to be all about for the government.

So just to recap there, so basically the government policy is focusing almost entirely on getting the private sector to build apartments, which 95% of which won't come for sale.

So it has to be built to rent.

So the biggest player then, is the biggest player in the housing market now the state or is it the built to rent investors?

Because we're told that, you know, the built to rent stuff is slowing down because it's not profitable enough for them somehow.

But so who's the biggest player at the moment?

It's not you or I.

No, it's the state in various guises has taken up about a quarter of the housing stock, right?

Now, interestingly enough, when you say that it's not, as I say viable, I wish I'd stop using the word viable, right?

Profitable is the word that, and viability is kind of like a sleeving word for profitability, like, you know.

So it's about profitability.

But really, what happens is the state is the biggest player.

They're taking up about a quarter of all new housing.

But a lot of the housing they're taking up is bought from people who have land with planning commission for apartment blocks and now have nobody to buy them if they do build them.

So there's nobody there to buy them.

So the banks won't fund them then to get built.

So the state is stepping in and saying, we will guarantee to buy them at the end of the process and they've given them a letter.

The developer runs off to AIB or the bank and says, look, the council are going to buy them all.

So therefore the bank will fund them because they have a guaranteed buyer at the end, which is the state, blue chip.

Purchaser.

Or else the state will fund the development themselves.

And the builder would build them out for them or the developer would build them out for them.

Either way, the state is a big player there.

So even though there's no market for the guys who are doing it for the private sector, for the big investors, they've now found a market in the state.

And you think that because the state was the only market there, they'd be getting great value, right?

Because they're the only game in town.

But they're not getting great value at all.

John McCartney, who used to be head of research in Savills and then BNP Parabas, and now he's an extra with us in TU Dublin, he wrote a great place in the Irish Times recently about this very fact that you know the state is such a big player it should be getting really really good value and it's not so the other kind of kick in the teeth about all this is that state like as in us is paying through the nose for all these things at the same time it's kind of bailing out a lot of guys who might bad financial decisions but we know.

Historically that we're we're not very the state not we but the state is not very good at getting value for money for anything and I'm not going to go down the whole bike shed route but it's it's a I think with the children's hospital and all that, we know that's how they operate because they've proven it.

So if government policy then is focusing more on apartments and we're not getting anything newly built, like you might argue with the state building social, like obviously we need more than that with the homeless figures the way they are.

But we also need things to be built that people can buy.

And the bigger developers aren't going to do that because there's more money in it for them to build a rent.

And so is there something we can do there or something we can look towards where we go back to the way we used to do things and we'd have maybe smaller builders, if we could find them, but smaller builders to maybe start building more houses that people could buy?

Well, okay, just go back for a second to the value from anything.

It's really interesting.

I'm nearly finished writing the book and I'm going back starting in 1720 and I'm writing about the first maps of Ireland and the first Griffith valuations and also the workhouses, right?

The workhouses from around the country, right?

Back in the day, there was huge functions with workhouses.

So they brought in an English architect called George Ripponson to design and build all these workshops, which he did, workhouses, which he did.

And there was huge complaints over the cost of them.

So then the solution was to reduce extraneous detail on the buildings.

This is exactly the same as now, right?

The floors, they cost a lot of money.

If you think balconies, right?

In those days, they're talking about the floors.

So take out the timber floors and let them sleep on the dirt, right?

It was exactly the same thing.

Cost overruns, delays, liability, defects, insurance, exactly the same in 1838 as it is in 2024, right?

So the BAM, the Bill Children's Hospital, bike sheds, all that stuff.

There is nothing new under the sun in all this, right?

We have a history of this kind of crack, you know?

So back to what we can do ourselves, I think we've put all our eggs in huge developers, right, who can build huge apartment blocks, okay?

The vast majority of small, medium-sized building companies are, they build houses.

They have no experience in building four, five, six, ten-story apartment blocks.

So therefore, they'll never get funding for it because they go to the bank and the bank will say, have you ever built, you know, six stories before?

And they go, no, because they build houses and housing estates.

So they won't get funding.

So we've kind of, we've sidelined hundreds of SME building companies in the country by focusing on these, you know, large apartments.

And we've also confused this concept of density.

Oh, it's all the way, density, density, density.

Density doesn't have to be high rise.

Like you go to the Netherlands, right?

If you draw a line from Dublin to Galway, everything south of that is the size of the Netherlands, right?

We have 5.2 million population.

They have 17 and a half million people, right?

They've got three and a half times our population living in half the land.

Do they build high?

Not really.

They build dense.

They build density.

They build housing that's three stories, and they might not have a front garden, but they build a lot of parking in the space for kids and parks and all that stuff.

But they do density really well.

We've insisted that it can only be apartments, and therefore we've excluded hundreds of SME building companies.

So the solution really is, yeah, back to what we used to do really well.

It doesn't necessarily have to be sprawling housing estates, but using SME builders to fill in all those small sites that large builders won't go near.

exactly all the rural towns around the country.

Your Comels, your Tipperary's, your, you know, your Sligos, all those places.

There are loads of sites there and there's no funding for builders, like for SME builders to get asked so that they can go in and develop like their medium density housing in those areas.

And the Housing Finance Agency, which is a state body that was set up to lend to builders, like it lends at exactly the same rate as a bank, like nine and 10%.

So where's the advantage there for anybody, you know?

So we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot at every turn, you know?

So a lot of, I'm increasingly convinced, Karen, that a lot of the problems that we have ourselves.

Yeah, you're probably overpaying for your mortgage protection.

Now, I'm not because I use Beat the Bank and I've been dealing with them for years.

They're an Irish company and in a world where most companies in the home buying process are out for themselves.

It's refreshing to have one that genuinely cares about you, as cliche as that sounds, but they really do.

So how they work is they check the main insurers, they match the best price, and then they take more off.

It's quick, it's online, and they handle all the paperwork.

They also do income protection, life insurance, and soon they'll be doing home insurance, car insurance, even pet insurance.

So www.beatthebank.ie to get a quote in seconds.

So if they can't get the financing for it then, and those sites are then left undeveloped, what happens then?

How can we go around it?

Is there an argument there for cheaper funding?

What about co-ops?

I was looking at that with the Denmark thing, because I'm doing a podcast at the moment.

and trying to come up with solutions and the Vienna model and all that stuff that we always hear about the Kenny Report from whatever 1975.

So like, what's the solution there to any of those sites that are there?

Or should we be looking at, could we fund those builders, those smaller builders for tackling, I don't know, vacant and derelict homes with the hundreds, hundred odd thousand of those lying around?

Yeah, it's all that.

You know what I mean?

There's a lot, like the government seems to have only one strategy, which is build lots of apartments.

And unfortunately, they're off of rent.

And that seems to be the only idea they have because it's a very industry friendly idea.

You know, it suits the industry because they can make loads of money on it.

And then the industry come crying, clapping hands, oh, it's not viable, i.e.

profitable to do that.

And of course it is.

So therefore they reduce standards even more.

And they get, they have cheerleaders out there and so-called housing experts who say that we need to make smaller units and, you know, remove the batteries and all that kind of nonsense.

So, you know, they put all the legs in those batteries, but they don't deliver what Irish people need, what your, you know, your normal households need.

So it's all that kind of stuff.

It's lending at really a price.

Rates.

Now, they're terrified to do that because they say, oh, it's anti-competitive.

European legislation says, you know, you can't compete with the market.

Well, other countries do it, so I don't know why we can't do it.

You know, loads of Vienna City Council lends to private developers at preferential rates.

There's loads of places that do that.

But it's also incentivising small infill sites, vacancy, dereliction, using the tax system to free up existing housing as well.

So you read a lot about downsizing.

Now, I don't read the concept of downsizing because in my mind, it's always, there's a kind of a nudge like a really insidious kind of nudge thing you read in the paper all the time but if you're an older person and you're sitting in your big house on your own and oh you feel guilty because you know i'm living this big house on my own i shouldn't be i should give it up for a young couple or whatever but downsizing is a rich person's game like you need to have money because there's no bridging finance to choose you can buy an apartment at the same time before you sell your house etc etc um you know you need to be able to have the cash there to buy your apartment and then sell your house so you need to be well to do that we could use tax system and stat duty to make that more viable for people to do, you know what I mean?

To make it more feasible for people if they want to downsize.

And if they don't want to, I think that's their business, to be honest with you.

Nobody should tell anybody to do inside their home.

But where are they going to downsize?

There's nothing for them to buy.

That's the problem.

Well, next you have 875,000 euro last year in Dublin.

Who's going to buy a two-bedroom apartment?

You know what I mean?

That's exactly it.

So then they end up moving farther away from their communities and where they go to bingo and whatever they do, you know.

So they're not going to do that so they don't they just don't sell of course i'm a little bit You know, you've got to think about it logically.

And also, there's a lot of houses that look on paper.

Like, a lot of the ideas come out of here.

It's just from analyzing spreadsheets.

No concept of how the real world works.

So, somebody would say, oh, there's a lot of older people living in houses that are too big for their needs.

Or, like, five bedrooms and there's only two of them living in the house.

They have no idea.

So, I have lots of friends whose parents live on their own in the house.

But at the weekend, the whole family descends on the house with all the kids and grandkids and blah, blah, blah.

And there's mayhem and chaos for a few days, right?

And then the kids all go back to their own house for the weekend.

The parents are on their own in the house.

and you can have hobbies.

You might have an air machine downstairs or upstairs in one of the bedrooms.

You might have a home office.

So I don't like this idea that on paper it says there's too many people living in houses that are too big for the means.

Nobody knows what people's needs are.

So it's classic spreadsheet analysis.

You get this kind of crack as well with a lot of the ideas around that people look at spreadsheets but they don't actually sound like it works.

So is this where maybe the lobbyists are writing this policy again towards trying to maybe push these people into log cabins in their gardens and let their families move into their house?

Like, is this where we're going with this whole log cabin planning permission thing?

That's another idea, right, that comes from a spreadsheet.

It's not a new idea either.

None of the ideas that I have seen in recent years are new at all.

But it's this idea that, you know, we have so much space in the city and if you divide it by 45 square meters, we could fit X amounts of sheds in people's back gardens that they can live in, you know?

The real world doesn't work like that for lots of reasons.

There's lots of reasons why you wouldn't want to do that.

For a start, the likes of Irish water, Ishka Aaron wouldn't want it at all because you end up with back gardens being concreted over, right?

So you end up with all these concrete platforms and back gardens, and then you end up like, one thing Irish water really like is people have gardens, okay?

Now, I was a bad boy a few years ago.

I took out my front garden and put in concrete for a driveway, right?

That was the wrong thing to do if you listen to this, right?

You need lots of glass because our drainage system is already suffering, you know, Victorian drainage system that we have.

So you need, so Irish water, the last thing they want to see is a proliferation of concrete over back gardens and water running into the drains, and then you have floods everywhere, then there's a whole idea.

A lot of them will turn into illegal rents, whatever.

That's the evidence that has been around the world.

And the RTB won't get any extra funding to regulate this or to control this.

You will have elder abuse whereby parents are getting not so subtly nudged to move into the back garden in their own house and let their kids live in the main house.

And then you'll have mayhem with things like, you know, people move into a shed into your neighbor's back garden and there's no planning permission needed for it and they'll bring along a second car, right?

So now you're on a street, looking out at my own street here, now you're on a street and you have like 30% more cars being parked everywhere.

Mayhem.

then rounds between neighbours and all this and stuff and then the council don't even know how many people there are so these kind of deals to me to be honest which are really simplistic and we know that they don't really contribute anything but they do cause they do have bad outcomes Very well said and I think people, often forget about the drainage thing like I'm getting my driveway done next week and that was part of my thinking was because at the moment my driveway is pure concrete and we're getting.

That all dug up and putting the stabilisation grids in putting the stones out so that there is drainage there and that it holds a bit of water and then it drains out slowly.

It's the way it should be done and then the grass in the backyard.

It's what I should have done.

Don't get me started on AstroTurf as well.

I've a hatred of that.

That's what I should have done and that's what people should do.

So Ciarán is talking sense here.

The last thing, we don't need to go over the water issue, but we're already, our sewage system is Victorian and it's crumbling at the seams and Ring's End is full and all that kind of stuff.

The last thing I want to see, a double cocked up in C cancer, want to see is more water going into the drainage system like that's not what we want that's not and that's like you're going to need concrete raft ventilation for all these things i was looking because i'm beside mead street here mead street's been getting dug up for the last quite a few months and uh you can see all the old water pipes out i could because they've removed them and they have them on the road and then they're putting this big huge blue brand new plastic pipe that's going in they've been doing it for a long time i'd say the businesses are losing their mind but When you actually see the old pipes, it's like you could nearly pull it apart with your hands, aren't they?

They're completely crumbling.

And God only knows what they're leaking into the water as well.

Exactly, yeah.

They're full of holes.

Our leakage rate is huge.

We lose, I can't remember, I wrote something earlier on this year and I can't remember, it's 25 to 40.

We lose a huge amount of water too because of these old pipes.

So we need to be really careful how we manage our water.

Putting concrete in overbought gardens everywhere is not the cleverest idea.

So anyone listening to this is probably getting annoyed now as well because, you know, it's not looking good in terms of prices.

So what is it what do you what would you suggest what can people do can we give them anything that they can go off and maybe speak to their local representatives about or their family and friends or whatever what could what can people actually do to try and improve things yeah well the interesting thing like what families are doing and i see it and i i hate this i do the radio podcast i'm like it's kind of it's very negative and i don't mean to be negative but these are just data and the facts like you know and what you see is that what people are doing and younger people in particular Like, it was the case a few years ago that the greatest house price inflation was all around Dublin, like, so Mead, Loud, Wicklow, and Kedair, right?

Then that moved into Longford and Los Coma, right?

And now that's moved up to the border region.

So the border region house prices went up by 11% last year, which is the highest proportion in any region in the country.

So people are moving farther and farther away.

I don't know what the government, you know, approaching your TDs and approaching that, like, TDs have very little power, in my experience.

and they're kind of told what to do by party whips and follow the party leader's line on this.

So you'd wonder how effective it is.

But like ultimately, you know, and I said this this morning on the radio and I kind of, I'm running out of patience.

But really, the people to blame aren't, it isn't industry capacity, it's not COVID, it's not the greatest economic unpleasantness in 2017, 2018, it's none of that.

The people to blame are ministers, the minister, current minister and his successors, his special advisors and the civil servants who are the relevant civil servants who are involved in this.

They are the only three people that I blame for the cast.

They have huge powers given to them to change policy and to change legislation.

So therefore, they have huge responsibility for the outcomes, right?

And they're the people I find and it's very hard to get to that.

You know, I was at a thing recently down in New Ross in summer school in New York.

No politician would come up at all to talk about housing on stage in front of a local audience.

No politician at all so it's hard to get through to them I don't know what makes them ticker what can move the dial as they say on yourself I don't know what can happen that happens that will you know change their thinking unless there's actual like on the street protests and even we had that would raise the roots and you know the unions organizing that and i'm not sure how successful that was you get tens of thousands of people out but you don't see michael martin or simon harris who are you know who have moved hugely to the right particularly fianna fall like fianna fall used to be the party of house builders and that's what they were known for for good or bad right it wasn't all good that that connection and now they're just a party of like quite a neoliberal party in many ways like they might be socially left as in you know we'll give abortion referendum when we had same-sex marriage, all that kind of stuff.

But the country made it socially left.

But the main political parties, and you'd always expect it from Fianna Fáil, but Fianna Fáil have moved to occupy a huge space in the trail of Fianna Fáil as quite a right-wing neoliberal party.

The emphasis is always on the market, the market, the market.

So that's why we have no, that's why we have water problems, right?

Because the state always felt that the market would solve our problems.

And I have no doubt that they intended to sell off Irish water and some British company would come in and fix all the pipes, charging us at the same time for our water through that, you know.

And I'd note, like, so the whole ideology has been one of the state should spend as little as possible and the private sector will take care of it.

And that has never worked, really.

What you end up with is outcomes that the private sector wants, but that don't suit society.

And you see that in the UK, huge water bills at the same time as the CEOs are taking multi-million pound packages home.

People are getting crucified with water bills and leaks everywhere and water, dirty water in the taps and all that.

So you see that lack of investment.

So it's really hard to get through to kind of policy makers and politicians that this just isn't working for people.

And just people, one might argue as well for the odd left wing thing they did, like in terms of marriage referendums and abortion referendum and all, that was actually activists on the ground that kind of forced their hand into that.

I think they were begrudgingly pushed towards those.

But I guess a good place to leave it would be even just people having conversations with each other, with their family, with whoever.

and then the more people that are getting a bit more annoyed about this.

Because ultimately, it's going to come down to votes, isn't it?

Well, it's interesting, Kurt.

Yeah, no, it's just back on the policy scene when I think about it.

Like, it's interesting.

I got a few emails this morning.

I had to give it with the Irish time.

And they were definitely from leafy South County Dublin, you know, suburbs, who would probably be old school, thin girls, older side.

And they were giving out as well about all the apartments going up and nothing for them to buy or their kids to buy or downsize to or all that kind of stuff.

And I have mates, I'm at the age now, where I've mates who are quite successful.

You know, they've done well over the years.

And wealthy people tend to vote wise, right?

So they'd all be Fine Gael fathers.

I know they are, and we laugh about it, right?

And I say, that's your affliction now, you know?

And they go, well, it's just, that's what they do.

But even they are coming around and saying, Jesus, nothing is working here.

So when you have the party faithful, like, and the loyalists saying, this isn't working, you know, it's funny that they haven't picked up on that on the ground.

You know what I mean?

The actual party organizations themselves, Fine Gael and Fine Gael, haven't picked up on it.

Like, people are just not happy with this, you know?

Yeah, and I guess, what's the alternative?

That's the thing they'll always say then, if they're not voting for those established parties, what's the alternative?

But even if you do, so what you notice over the last year is, we have a kind of benign dictatorship versus about the 1990s, even if you don't vote for one, the two of them end up getting it together anyway.

You know what I mean?

So it's very hard to do it.

The only thing you can do is try, if they lost a few high profile seats, I think that would probably help.

You know what I mean?

If you had a minister lose a seat, a minister for housing, for example, lose a seat, that would probably send a signal.

I mean, I think one of the biggest problems is the ease of access that lobbyists get to the policymakers and the ministers.

You don't see me or you getting invited in too often, Karen, maybe you do, but getting invited into the customer is too often to give your ideas.

I won't be after this podcast, anyway.

So, you know, but, but yet if you're, if you're a lobbyist, like, you know, and particularly if you're an ex-politician, right, you can just walk into Leinster House for the rest of your life, even though you're a lobbyist.

And that's totally inequitable.

It's unfair.

Anti-democratic and so one of the things i would love to see is just a ban on lobbying for 12 or 18 months and then see how policy changes you yeah and that's maybe where we could come in and you lobby your local politicians but you're a powerful voice like these these kind of podcasts are very powerful voices you know what i mean because you have a particular audience which is quite you know it's at that you're hitting the demographic which is really important who are going to see that most you know we're at the stage you know when you're 36 it's the average age to get married have your first baby and buy your first house, right?

A very busy year, right, for people.

But that's the average age, you know, and that's a crucial age.

They're politically savvy, they're aware.

I mean, if they can be motivated to go out and vote, that's probably like that.

Brilliant.

That's probably a good place to leave it.

Thanks so much as insightful as always, Lorcan.

I really appreciate it.

Welcome, Kerry.

No pleasure, as always.

August, Sinead, on episode show of the Crazy House Prices podcast.

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Again, massive thank you to Lorcan for coming on and giving us such valuable insights.

He's so good at this stuff and he's very on top of everything that's going on.

And as depressing as these episodes can be, it's just always good to have something to work on there, something for people to take away where whether it's making them more angry and giving them a bit of a motivation to try and do something about this.

Any little bit helps in that kind of thing.

But anyway, thanks so much for listening.

I'll chat to you all soon.

Sláinte fóin.