County Dublin

This is Newstalk's production about homes and housing, interiors and architecture.

Coming up today, Home of the Year judge Sarah Cosgrove will be in studio revealing the stars appearing and Dublin Design Week.

How the Irish bedroom has changed since the 1940s.

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next week sees the beginning of Dublin Design Week, which runs until the 20th of September.

Can you believe it is going to be the 20th of September soon? Showcasing the very best of Irish interiors and fashion design.

One of the extraordinary things about it is that you've got these senior politicians who are delivering local – they're senior national politicians who are delivering local authority backing for various kinds of developments often.

They're clearly – so Ray Burke, although he's a government minister, is also a power broker in the Dublin County Council as it was at the time who can deliver the Fianna Fáil votes that will – and can deliver the public servants as well, the officials within those councils to ensure that developers get the go-ahead.

Can we talk about those developments in terms of the crisis that remains ongoing in, for instance, the housing market in the Dublin area in particular? Does the fact that development in Dublin from certainly – through the late 20th century and probably into the early 21st century was dominated by these corrupt – relationships that were brokered in backhander dealings between developers and politicians.

Does that affect the world in which people are trying to buy and rent housing today?

Well, I think the first point is that and to me it struck me as very significant that at the exact time that these major bribes were being paid to public officials and elected politicians, not just Ray Burke, but at least a third of the members of Dublin County Council were found by the tribunal to have taken bribes, many of them through a PR man called Frank Dunlop.

Bribes from 500 quid to 5,000 and Lawler was looking for, for instance, on one occasion in exchange for a map that Gilmartin was looking about to identify the landowners, of properties in West Dublin, at Quarryvale, where he wanted to live.

What became Liffey Valley, yeah.

And so the idea that, well, you know, they were zoning for housing, so at the end of the day it was all good, that misunderstands the degree to which it was chaos.

I kind of made that switch for a couple of years ago from Roscrae in County of Prairie originally.

And I was living in Dublin up to just May gone.

The wife brought me back down home, so she did.

So yeah, this is all...

I'm not a farmer.

I've never farmed in my life, even though the accent might sound like it.

I didn't know the accent when I was in Dublin, but when I was in the Guard, obviously I was living in Dublin and when they left, I stayed up there and Callie, my wife, she moved up and we were living there for about 18 months together.

But obviously I was there for a combined of about five years.

That seems reasonable enough, doesn't it?

Well, it does, except that, like, even a bog average house in, in County Dublin is gonna cost you half a million.

So just to get something that's totally average, you're gonna end up with a tax bill for having the gall to receive something, something from people who loved you, who they worked all their lives for.

Not necessarily.