The Housing Finale: Can Ireland Build Its Way Out?

About this episode

The episode discusses how Ireland can address its housing crisis through effective strategies and planning reforms.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People in this episode

Hosts: David McWilliams, John Davis

Guest: Ronan Lyons

Topics covered

• housing market
• Ireland
• urban planning
• population forecasting
• housing strategy

Keywords

• housing crisis
• planning reform
• tax incentives
• urban jobs
• density

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Ireland

More episodes of The David McWilliams Podcast

• Inside the World Cup's Narco State · June 11, 2026 · 41 min
• Why Social Democracies Win World Cups · June 9, 2026 · 41 min
• The Coming Water Crisis · June 4, 2026 · 29 min
• Why Trump Is About to Come for Ireland · June 2, 2026 · 41 min
• How Trump Could Kill the Dollar · May 28, 2026 · 48 min
• Why Nobody's Having Babies Anymore · May 26, 2026 · 51 min