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

Nonsensical rubbish. You can't consider the present without acknowledging the past. Countries like Denmark, Austria, Sweden etc. have centuries upon centuries of wealth built up to draw on - they had empires. We have come a long way, and when you do that, your infrastructure struggles to keep up.

Ireland is not suffering from literally the worst housing crisis in the history of the state - that is overblown hyperbolic hysteria. Things were far worse in the 1930s and 1940s when people lived in slum housing and shacks.

The quality of life for people in this country is getting better every year. More holidays, more nights out, more new cars, more consumption, better education, longer lifespans, by every single measure, life is getting better. Never let the truth get in the way of one of your moans.

We have more demand for houses than we have houses available. Thats evident from the sky high rental and purchase prices, the very low numbers of properties on either market, the huge numbers on social housing lists, and the very high numbers of homeless people. Thats the core of the issue, which does mean there quite literally aren't enough houses for people.

In an ideal world where every house is utilised to the maximum of its potential, where there are zero vacant homes, zero holiday homes, zero airbnbs etc this mightn't be the case. But thats not the case in the real world.

Denmark or Austria are not using "centuries of wealth" to pay for current government spending. Spending to build housing, or pay police, or pay nurses comes from current government revenue. Which Ireland currently has more of per capita than almost any country on Earth, both on a total and surplus per capita basis. But our current government has decided to not spend this money, which is purely ideological. And the results can be seen all around us.

If you think the quality of life for people in this country is getting better every year then you've clearly missed every poll, or statistic, on life in Ireland in recent years. People are drinking less, schools can't get staff, hospital waiting lists are through the roof, and home ownership is at its lowest point in decades. Those are all verifiable, hard, statistics. Opinion polls also completely back this up, as would any common sense - nobody with any contact with the health service, with gardai, with teachers, would tell you they're doing well currently.

By hey, don't take my word for it. Why do you think SF are currently polling as the #1 party by a large margin even with ABC1 voters? The richest, most educated, well to do voters in the state? Do you think its because they've all become Republican Socialists, or is it perhaps bcause current government policy is very obviously failing?

The starting wage for a nurse in Dublin in 2024 is €33k per year. Do you think thats a reasonable starting wage for someone with a college education, working a difficult, essential job?

Do you not think if we perhaps paid them more it would 1) ease our current recruitment/retention crisis, helping everyone in the state and 2) just be morally the right thing to do?

That aside, our overall healthcare spending isn't remotely excessive. We're in the middle of the OECD pack, very much inline with our wealthy peers:

It'd the opposite of myopic, it's eyes wide open.

There has been an unprecedented increase in the population of Ireland from abroad. That's a fact.

The housing crisis has moved in severity with that increase, year upon year. No coincidence.

It has reached such zenith that the government are playing a Mr bean with tartare sauce across the country, playing hide the refugee. And that's just refugees.

You don't invite 20 people to your house and then after the fact complain that you live in a 3 bedroom house. The fault was the invitation, the existential problem is the arrival of those extra people. It never had anything to do with the size of your home which was in the first place ordinarily adequate.

The housing crisis is built on the back of mass migration and there isn't a single thing in the world that can fix the crisis without tackling that cause.

If there is a recruitment crisis in the HSE, how come the headcount of nurses has risen sharply?

The HSE had added 8,000 nurses in four years.

Even scooby and the gang knows what's up

Bullshite: "we need to prevent demographic collapse by using mass migration!"

Realshite: the capacity crises caused by mass migration like housing, healthcare and childcare, are causing demographic collapse.

"The majority of new recruits coming from non-EU countries, particularly India and the Philippines.

Some 1,584 new registrants qualified in Ireland, and 4,542 qualified outside the EU – a rise of 50pc."

We're importing very large numbers of foreign nurses to try and fill in the gaps, but at the same time losing more experienced/senior Irish nurses. 75% of the new nurses we hire each year are now non-EU nationals. Thats the definition of a recruitment crisis, if you're having to import thousands of people a year to fill jobs you can't fill from your own population.

And even with this massive importation we're still far below the capacity increase required to actually staff our hospitals to the levels required to function - as seen above, and in plenty more examples if you care to look.

Our staffing numbers are required to increase significantly each year just to stand still due to 1) our massive population increases 2) our aging population and 3) understaffing hangovers from the 2010s austerity years.

AFAIK, the trade unions are against a Dublin allowance.

Don't those "outside" forces become "inside" forces once they emigrate to Ireland?

Or do you only count the pale ones?