Brittle: How the Housing Crisis Is Breaking Ireland — And How to Fix It

I just want to start, I suppose, with how you have framed this conversation.

And it's sort of a thread that runs through the entire book.

That the housing, and I don't even know if we can call it a crisis anymore.

You know, crisis is normally something that passes.

This just seems to be ongoing.

But that the situation with housing in Ireland is really reshaping society and the ability of normal people in Ireland to make a life.

Yeah, we often, and I'm as guilty as anyone here, I've been writing the Daft Report for 20 years now, often we focus on prices, but really the focus needs to be on people.

And even the name itself, Brittle, the idea behind that was that...

We keep, I hear it all the time, people are worrying, is this just another version of a repeat of what happened 20 years ago? But there's more than one way that a housing system can become really unhealthy.

A bubble is just one.

So we needed a kind of a new word to describe it.

And the idea behind Brittle is that When the system needs to expand, a healthy one will expand to meet the new need, the new housing need.

Ireland's system is not healthy.

It's brittle, it's cracking.

And you can see that, as you say, in how people are living their lives and how people are not living their lives.

And if there was maybe one main audience I had in mind for the book, it's actually adults under the age of 40 rather than over the age of 40.

Hopefully everyone finds it interesting.

But if we...

For me, the key measure, as you say, is it a crisis or is it not a crisis? How long does it go on? I think when do we know mission is accomplished? When do we know we've hit success? That's when if you ask people how they live and ask people how they would choose to live, there's no big gap between those.

But as long as we have hundreds of thousands of people, mostly younger adults in this country, living with parents or living with friends and strangers, when they would rather just live alone or with a partner, that's to me the best measure, single measure of how far away we are from a healthy system.

And how far away we are from a healthy system is one of the features in the book, because there are lots of startling graphs and statistics here.

I did limit myself to one for a

chapter.

I was trying to be very disciplined about that.

You were trying to move back from the economist within you.