"average Dublin house prices should fall to ‘the €300,000 mark" according to Many Lou McD.

For a start the regulation around alcohol doesn't, that I'm aware, heavily limit the availability of raw materials.

As far as I'm aware I can pretty much use any apple I like to make cider. It's not restricted to certain apples, in particular locations, meeting strict criteria.

The same for potatoes for chips.

Land for building is quite a different story.

Are you serious?

It will be up to one of the parties to move to limit welfare availability for long term welfare recipients. There are too many pull factors for those unable to look after themselves to have more children, such as place on the social housing list. Germany introduced measures a number of years ago called Harz IV that make it progressively worse to remain on welfare. Here we have the xmas "bonus" only for those who have been on the dole for a long time and not those who have recently lost their jobs!

It doesn't for a minute spoil my argument. A comparison between the availability of particular types of potatoes or apples and land for housing is ridiculous.

You don't, regulation is necessary. I would argue the role of the government is to make the regulatory process as smooth as possible to minimise obstruction.

After that, and depending what on the downstream social impact of the regulation is, they might want to spend to counteract it.

As for the supply of labour in construction, I would incentivise training and career switching, encourage inward migration with the relevant skills (much more difficult to do at this point than was the case even 5 years ago) and most importantly offer assurances to prospective tradespeople of the stability of labour demand within construction.

It's that last part FFG struggle mostly with and I suspect why they've been so slow to work on the labour side of the problem.

I took his point to mean in the future if the group of people expecting everything and contributing nothing continues to grow, we will be paying even higher taxation which would cause many higher earners to want to leave. I agree that people saying they want to leave because they can't afford a house here, then mention they plan to go to Australia or NZ, makes no sense at all.

The rates you quote are for development finance, typically in the 6.5 to 8% bracket in the market. They are not comparable to the longer term mortgage rates as the products perform differently and turnaround times are fast. A 1% shift in rate would be less impactful on total repayment as a result.

I don't think SF are planning to offer cheaper finance to building developers however. Stripping margins to zero will reduce demand for finance, that's for sure.

But it's the same for potatoes or realistically any product even commodities. Once you clear regulatory hurdles you still have to deal with customers and suppliers. Certain customers only want a certain type(s)/standard(s) of product. In food processing like potatoes for example you have a group of customers called the multiple ie Tesco, Dunnes, Lidl, Aldi etc who have massive market power and they have their own standards and demands that are in addition to the regulatory benchmarks. If you don't meet them you don't get to sell and you either go out of business or go for a very niche customer base. You can replicate a variation of this for every business and organisation going. That's before we even talk about staff, suppliers, financing etc.

Building houses is not especially unique in terms of the balancing customers, staff, suppliers, politicians etc. Obviously housing has its own unique quirks but that's no different from any other industry. Just because you or the wider public are not fimiliar with all the boring stuff that makes an organisation tick along does not mean it doesn't exist. Once you start getting down into the details like this thread has done on housing things gets complicated. It's the same for every industry and organisation regardless of size.

The government can build houses but there is a cost to that. It's better for everyone that people are up front with the costs as there is less drama down the line. Pie in the sky figures do no one any good. Massive cost overruns don't make for good headlines regardless of who is in government or the particular government project (ie government built social housing) in question. Look at the children's hospital.

Yes and the construction industry also has it's own idiosyncrasies around suppliers and customers etc.

However the regulatory efforts are far greater.

That's not to say other industries don't have regulation, just that it's not a similar supply obstacle.

Would you say it's as difficult, from a regulatory perspective, to bring medicines to market as it is potatoes?

Of course not, there are degrees of regulation, and what puts construction at the higher end of that, is that each house or development has to go through it's own process.

On your first point, I think it correct for a government to intervene to help a market function as close to a 'free market' as possible.

My issue is that FFG tell us construction will function like a 'free market' while largely only intervening on the demand side and ignoring supply obstacles.

That's either spin or utter incompetence.