> Trails of brown envelopes (bribes) have been sniffed out repeatedly, and then left to grow cold. Large scale developments were made and begun without any plan whatsoever to connect them to basic and necessary infrastructure such as sewage, or schools.
Can't argue with this, in fairness.
> The media have pointed fingers at immigrants, dole scroungers, and market forces - anything but policy. They give airtime to politicians who have been repeatedly proven to be actively working against us and caught in lies over and over. They smear anyone speaking truth.
This is just not true. It's almost libellous it's so wide of the mark. I don't know where you're getting this from. Nobody of any substance has ever blamed the crash or the housing crisis on immigrants, people on the dole, direct provision or anything like that. Immigration in particular has been an absolute non-issue the entire time.
> Irish housing policy for the last decade has been to sell property to vulture funds and foreign investors at firesale prices tax free, while the average Irish worker has none of the same advantages and no chance of getting on the ladder whatsoever.
This is not true either. Vulture funds buy non-performing loans (not property, loans), of which there are many, and for which reason we have higher than average mortgage rates. It's distasteful, but without them our current account fees and loan rates would be higher than they already are.
REITs are not vulture funds. They generally build to rent: they finance the construction, and then collect the rent. Without them there would be thousands fewer apartments in Dublin in particular. Cork city went a full decade without a single apartment complex being built. They serve a purpose. They don't pay corporation tax, but they do pay tax. See here: https://www.revenue.ie/en/tax-professionals/tdm/income-tax-c...
The funds swooping in post-construction and buying entire blocks of houses or apartments that would otherwise have gone on the open market, they're a different story. They can die screaming.
> Our government funds landlords with schemes such as HAP (1.5 billion euro directly to landlords since 2017) instead of building fucking houses. They then use those schemes to twist the numbers, pissing in our face and telling us its raining despite clear record homelessness and child poverty. We give foreign companies billions to build houses which we then rent off of them for decades and don't own at the end. It's sheer, clear insanity. And this Oxford chap seems completely unaware, yet wholly confident in his "understanding" of the issues we have.
HAP is a bad scheme. Totally agree. The "Oxford Chap" is a Trinity academic who writes the daft.ie reports on housing in Ireland. He knows what's going on as well as you do.
> This crisis was NOT built on misunderstandings, or myth, or innocent mistakes and apathy. It was CONSTRUCTED. And at every point, the wrong people have profited at the expense of the 40% of Irish who don't own a house.
Nobody manufactured the crisis on purpose. That's tinfoil hattery.