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

Indeed.

And a Visa type system may well become the norm in the future for Non EU citizens, though there will always be some commitment to hosting asylum seekers and refugees.

But ultimatlely, the govt will likley need to create a relationship between available accomodation/resources and IPAs.

How soon that will actually happen though, is anyones guess.

Right now, yes.

Similar to an extremely overweight person eating crap for the last 10 years, they'll be advised to cut out the vast majority of their current diet and refocus elsewhere.

A multi year plan no doubt.

If you want to fix multiple capacity crises, when years have already passed attempting to keep up with demand, then that leaves tackling demand as the only viable option left.

Yes, there should be a concerted, thoughtful, practical and effective apparatus in place to reduce population over a set number of years.

What's the alternative? Continue to build less housing than increasing demand? Depend on yet more migrant labour into a downward health system? Build less schools than there are children? And so forth. Years have been lost believing that nonsense.

Again, what's the alternative?

You don't have any alternatives then.

What you do have in abundance are weak attempts to categorise people so as to obfuscate real issues and real questions.

It's easy to catch some people out, make no mistake, but this type of defence against reality is old hat. It's weak and worthless.

If you can come up with an alternative to depopulation that doesn't repeat the same tired, provably ineffective ideas we've all heard for years, then you're just standing in the way of progress.

So you have no alternatives.

Years upon years in the making of multiple capacity crises due to mass migration, years and years to think it over, years to contemplate it, to analyse it, to form a single constructive thought.

And you've essentially come up with "let's do that again"

No thanks, the future isn't built on failed ideas. And it certainly isn't built on repeating failed ideas ad infinitum.

Reducing the population in a thoughtful and effective manner over a set period of time is easily achievable. The only questions of merit to ask are who is preventing it, and the less mysterious question of why.

Nobody is fixing this housing crisis without addressing mass migration.

Never say never.

Especially not in a finite world thin on patience.

Hands up who envisaged, 20 years ago, mass migration into Ireland at such scale they would be filling hotels with them and closing oap homes to fit them and housing crises because of it and vulture funds and protests and burning and not enough of anything etc.

In other words, things change. And they'll change again if there's an iota of intelligence left in the place.

I don't let hypothetical problems stop me from solving real problems.

Nobody is solving this housing crisis without addressing mass migration as the driver.

The fact of the unspent money shows that the support for the Council was there. Until you give an explanation of why the Council was so incompetent and had to give the money back, your thoughts hold zero relevance.

Some blustering maybe, but the facts are clear.

The Government gave DCC money to build social housing, DCC didn't spend it, DCC have questions to answer.

But again, not all immigrants to Ireland are the same. Its a very Twitter-y method of debate to say you have to be either for or against all migration.

How many doctors and nurses in Irish hospitals arrived here as asylum seekers? Almost none, they all arrive here legally with visas - because they have the qualifications to entitle them to this.

Its perfectly logically consistent to want to both severely limit the number of very expensive to the state asylum seekers we take in as a country, while expanding the number of essential worker immigrants (doctors, nurses etc) we take in that actually benefit the country and its people.

We're in the midst of the worst housing crisis in the history of the Irish state. There quite literally aren't enough houses for people. Theres nothing wrong with prioritising the people who're best for the country to take in and house.

County councils of all parties have been serial objectors to local developments:

https://extra.ie/2019/12/09/property/objection-housing-development-taoiseach

etc

We had €1.52bn unspent last year in the national Department of Housing's last budget. Is that also a disgrace? Do you hold FG and FF responsible for that?

DCC's underspend is also a problem obviously. But that amount still wouldn't have come anywhere near letting them build the thousands of social homes per year that it was suggested is in their capability. Which in reality would require far more national policy assisstance.

You really don't have a clue, do you?

The government don't build houses, local authorities do. The government provide money to local authorities to build housing, decent well-run councils build houses, ones run by Sinn Fein and a mish-mash of lefties sit on their arses and do nothing for five years. There is money unspent in the Department of Housing because councils were unable to spend it.

As for the blocking of housing, some parties (SF) are far worse than others in blocking houses, but only one party (again SF) used their time in control of a local authority to block everything.

The national government releases funds to local authorities to build houses. Local authorities quite literally aren't able to directly raise the billions of euros required to build the "thousands of houses per year" from local taxes. The policy has to be set, and funded, at national level. As discussed in this very thread on the past few pages, with the exact maths given to explain why this is so.

Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal have very little economic resemblance to Ireland in the year 2024. Spain and Italy are over ten times our size. Greece and Portugal are much poorer than us, with completely different economic structures to us.

Denmark and Austria are similar sized EU countries to Ireland, with similar levels of wealth, and a similar economic structure. We should be in or around their peformance on key metrics like housing, healthcare and general quality of life. But we aren't, we're doing much worse. And the only reason for that is down to Irish govermental failures.

What level we were at over 50 years ago is completely irrelevant to holding our current government to account. Leo Varadkar was born in 1979, how much impact did have as a political leader in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s?

Ireland is currently suffering from literally the worst housing crisis in the history of the state. Our healthcare, education, and police services are crumbling because they aren't well funded enough. Homelessness is at an all time high. Quality of life is getting worse year to year for most people in the state. And this is all happening at a time when we're running a multi-billion euro surplus per year. The current dire state of affairs is entirely down to current bad government policy since they were elected in 2020.

You think we have enough houses and flats for people?