The Housing Finale: Can Ireland Build Its Way Out?

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1:30How are you doing there? Welcome back to the third part of our trilogy on Irish, but also on Anglosphere housing. What went wrong? How did we get here? What is the state of play? And the third version of our trilogy is going to say, how do we build a healthy housing system, not just here in Ireland, but all over the English-speaking world, and increasingly in other necks of the woods, where a combination of rising population, changing dynamics, etc., is also leading to housing problems. Not on the same scale as ours, but clearly, if nothing is done, could end up somewhere like Ireland is now. And we are blessed, I would say, to have in the room, Professor Ronan Lyons, a titan, a lion in this particular area.

2:25Ronan, it's great to have you again. All right. Episode three, how do we fix this? Or a different slogan for episode three, make housing boring again. Right. That's me in my little baseball cap because that's what success ultimately looks like. We talked about a brutal housing system. M-H-B-A. So I'm just... We'll work on the acronym. We'll get there. We'll get there. Okay. I actually would love to have one of these and walk into a bar with a big sort of L.A. Lakers sign ripped off and put on the front, M.H.B.A. Enigmatic, unusual, mysterious. Okay. Let's make housing boring again. It's obviously copyright, but I'll give you a cut of the, you sell them on the podcast, I'll give you a cut.

3:13But make housing boring again. And what I mean by that is like, if you think about what happens when you have a brittle housing system, going back to the language from the first in the trilogy, with a brittle housing system, you get these pressures, these costs, these side effects. You get angry 20 and 30 somethings living at home with their parents or living in Australia because they can't afford a place in Ireland. You get people who want to downsize later on. You get all sorts of problems. And that translates into political challenges. in other words, housing is never out of the headlines. But it doesn't have to be that way.

3:50There are places not with perfect housing systems, but with better housing systems, healthier housing systems, where housing doesn't dominate like it does in Ireland and in a couple of other countries. So part of Ireland's problem, certainly, I'll speak more confidently about Ireland in this case, is that because it's an emergency, you tend to get too many solutions, not necessarily the right solutions. The politicians have to be seen to be doing something. This is something, therefore we do this. And it's not actually taking a step back and going, what system do we want to build? And that system, what does a healthy system look like?

4:25Well, this will sound a little bit out of time, but bear with me. Firstly, it's where supply responds to changes in demand. That sounds like the most econ 101 thing you could say. But fundamentally, it's untrue in housing at the moment. that we have had phenomenal increases in housing demand or housing required in Ireland and across the high-income world, and we haven't seen supply matching it. Because once supply responds to changes in demand, then you get prices moving within a relatively narrow band relative to people's incomes. It's affordable. And then as a consequence of that, people can form or dissolve or reform households as their lives change.

5:07right that ultimately that bit around mobility and living your life as you see fit that is the true measure of success it's very motherhood and apple pie but it goes back to what we talked about the first time around that if you're only measuring the prices bit and you're not actually measuring the mobility and how people are living their lives and whether they're living their lives the way they would want to what gets measured gets managed and if you're not measuring then you're not managing and that's I think the the trap that Ireland has has fallen into and it's one of the reasons we don't have a healthy housing system.

5:39So you're saying boring, etc. So let's say our objective is Economics 101 to have a housing system that works in the sense that when demand increases, supply responds, and your margin of error on your price is actually a choice that people make. If you want to buy a swanky house, you can buy a swanky house. If you want to buy an average house, your price will reflect that. How do we get there? Yeah. And so as I say, like who would disagree with what I just said, right? Like it's so, it's, it's, let's think about the brass tacks. So what do you actually have to say? You said Anodyne, we didn't use that, we never use that term for guests in this podcast.

6:18Think of a triangle, right? And at the top of the triangle, you've got a household's income, right? And on one of the bottom corners, you've got the price of housing. And on the other corner, you've got the cost of providing new housing. But every household worries about the link between their income and the price of housing. That's their affordability challenge. You look in the US at the moment and rents, if you're paying rent, rents have gone up 50 % in a lot of US cities over the last five years alone. There's been a phenomenal change for people to live with. Firms, they don't worry about the income bit per se, at least not directly.

6:52They're worried about the price of housing and the cost of housing. You know, go back to your econ 101 again. If P is greater than C, if price is greater than cost, supply will happen. That's viability. So you've got affordability one bit, viability along the bottom. But there's a third bit of the triangle, which I'd call efficiency, right? It's the link between people's incomes and the cost of providing new homes. That, to me, in housing, is the government's job. It should be responsible for ensuring that the cost of providing new homes is in some sort of relationship with everyday incomes. Now, that leads me directly with my policy hat on to say, okay, if, for example, prices are out of whack, costs are out of whack.

7:40So prices are out of whack with income, costs are out of whack with variability. Just imagine that that's where we've got to because of a brittleness, right? And therefore, supply is not responding. demand is going through the roof supply can't respond and once it does respond affordability kicks in so punters can't afford it i come back to my little example of parliament street many years ago that the tax system can do one or two things do many things but you know economics it either it can raise revenue and it can change behavior right now if in the case of ireland you're getting buckets of revenue from our friends in Apple.

8:19You shouldn't be really that worried about how much revenue is coming in from tax on houses, etc. Do you think that the short-term fix to this, with some long-term visibility, is actually making mortgages cheaper by making mortgages tax-deductible in a massive way? The problem with that is that you're loading up more onto, what we talked about in the second episode about the kind of pro-home ownership bias that once you think of it like you're swimming to get into some sort of lifeboat and once you get it you're done you're fine you're sorted right but then actually the lifeboat's now speeding away and the people who are left behind they're not going to get saved right it widens the gap between those who own and those who don't.

9:05Could you just just sort of come back to you that are actually also making your monthly rental bill tax deductible. My point is not to see the tax system as a bag of swag that is permanent, fixed and immutable. And if you take a little bit out of there, you'll have less swag in it. But to see the tax system as a very variable, dynamic function of all sorts of things. But if your emergency is to fix housing, don't worry about the revenue. In fact, don't only worry about the signaling effect. I agree with you on that. You hear this occasionally, people say, why don't we cut VAT, why don't we cut sales tax on new homes or something, and then we can get, and you'll hear people say, well, will they actually cut the price of homes once you cut the price of VAT, which mistakes the point of the policy.

9:51The point of the policy is not to make the homes that are already getting built cheaper. The point of the policy is to get more homes built that otherwise would not. So as you say, David, it's a quantity thing, right? If you get from 30 ,000 to 60 ,000 homes, the government is not losing money. because it has taken action to go from 30 ,000 to 60 ,000, twice as many people employed building homes, twice as much VAT or whatever it is coming in from home. All that good stuff, twice as many multinational jobs because the people can live here. Whatever you decide is your metric. Exactly, whatever your metric is.

10:19But I agree with you completely that the tax system can be used to that effect. The concern is that we get trapped into this. Well, I didn't see prices going down by X, therefore it wasn't a success. And politicians do, they're susceptible to that. They think that they get to determine the burden of taxation or subsidies and they don't. But to give you numbers on the scale of the problem, we talked in the first episode about smaller households. So about three quarters of the new households that are going to be added in Ireland over the next generation are going to be one to two persons. So that tells you about three quarters of the new homes, probably more if you want to catch up in terms of where the housing stock is, should be apartments.

10:59There was a study out a couple of weeks ago, Society of Chartered Surveyors. it costs about 550 ,000 euro at the moment to make a two-bed apartment in Ireland. If the yield on that, right, if the institution that owns it at the end, if they're looking at a 5 % yield and you got some maintenance costs, standard kind of 20 % maintenance costs, then the minimum monthly rent for a new two-bed apartment is 2 ,750 euro. Wow. If we believe that the cost, that housing should be no more than a third of your disposable income, that's kind of usually the golden rule. If you're above a third, you're kind of overburdened with housing costs.

11:41Then you need a net monthly income of 8 ,000 euro, over 8 ,000 euro, which in Ireland with the tax system means that this household has to have a gross annual income of something like 150 ,000 euro. Now, think about that for a minute. the minimum spec two-bed apartment at the moment, you need an income of 150 grand. Now, average incomes for all-time employees in Ireland is about 50 ,000 euro. So even if you've got a two-person household, they need to be earning 50 % above the average just to be able to afford the minimum spec. So this problem is huge. So going back to your proposal around the tax system, absolutely, if we're going to have some progress on this in the rest of the 2020s, we're going to have to take some measures that involve taxes and subsidies, 100%.

12:27Okay, well, let's look at all the other bits and pieces. Practical steps right now. Let's park the tax thing. Let's look at something else. What practical steps could we take? So if we think about this as, like, how would the government go? I talked about kind of affordability in the triangle. You've got the affordability bit, prices to incomes. You've got the viability bit, prices to costs. And then that last bit was the efficiency bit. The costs to incomes bit of the triangle. I think that no matter where you are, if you were a policymaker involved in housing, national, local, Ireland, US, France, New Zealand, wherever it is, you should be able to answer the following question.

13:10How high up the income distribution do you have to be to afford the basic and minimum spec home in your area? So that exercise I just did with how much does it cost to build a home and how much would you need? How high up do you have to be in income distribution to afford the basic minimum spec home. And if you can't answer that question as a policymaker with some responsibility for housing in your city or country, you're not doing your job well. Every policymaker, and I don't think they can, like I'm saying this is where we should be going, that everyone should be able to answer that question.

13:40Because if we go back to our ABCs, our assisted, our blocked and our covered, how do you ever make the blocked go into one of the other two groups? It's only ever by connecting up those two groups. If you've got to be one third of the way up the income distribution to afford the basic home, okay, then under one third, you've got to be assisted. You're covered in the top two thirds and you're assisted in the bottom third. But what if, and this is basically the Irish example, what if the bottom 25 % is covered in some way by assisted, they're the assisted group, but only the top 25 % can afford the minimum spec.

14:15You've got 50 % in the middle that are in this blocked group. And the reason I say... Which is where we are. Yeah, exactly. Which is where we are. If you don't dispute the 500 grand figure for the basic two-bed apartment, let's not dispute it. Let's just say, okay, this is what it costs. I'm not too sure it is, but let's just say it. That means half the population are not only blocked, but half the population are also there for seething, they're angry, and they feel completely betrayed by the society. Exactly. Now, the 550 figure, that's a private sector completion of an apartment. As you say, you could write off the land costs, right?

14:56If the council or the state owns the land, you could say, do you know what, we're going to just class it as zero, and that would cut the cost. How much would that be of a 500 grand apartment? At best, it might take 100 grand off, which is not nothing. It's not nothing. It's not nothing at all, actually. Realistically, more likely 50 grand, 50 to 70 grand off for an apartment. Okay. You could also maybe get rid of the profit margin. You say, well, you know, we don't want, yes, we're going to borrow for this, but actually we're the city council, we're an approved housing body, a non-profit housing body.

15:25So we don't need a margin, right? That'll cut a little bit off as well. Is the margin for developer about 20, 25 %? Less. You can see from the public institutions in Ireland. Yeah, it's kind of, you're talking 10 to 15%. So let's say it's 15 and you're knocking another, that's 50, 60K. You know, this is a lot of bread. I mean, there are ways in which you could change the way in which we deliver these apartments to take a big chunk off that price, that$550. And what you're doing is exactly the right exercise for policymakers to do. So look at this and go, okay, can we move that line that has assisted?

16:03Can we move that in some way? Can we use public money better? Can we do something about the cost of land or the cost of capital? How do we get the market to cover more? So some way we can make the market more efficient by having lower cost of capital. It's about getting those A and C group to cover more and more of the population, the assisted and the covered, and to get rid of that block. That is exactly the kind of exercise we need. And unfortunately, that's a systemic view. Unfortunately, that systemic view is not really there. It's usually based on, oh, we have a viability problem. Let's do something.

16:32What's the something going to do? There's a scheme in Ireland called Econia around subsidizing apartments. They didn't actually understand how big the viability gap was. And when they introduced this subsidy, it was inadequate for homes in Cork or Waterford City or Limerick City. So let's just get back to this idea. You've got housing costs. You've got incomes, right? This is such a fundamental idea. Are you saying to me that in your experience, housing policymakers are not giving this, not only sufficient, but thought at all? I really want to be corrected on this. I want someone to get in touch with you afterwards and go, we do this all the time.

17:20There is something around it called the housing needs and demand assessment. It doesn't really get into this kind of detail around how much it costs to build homes. It has some projections around prices and incomes, but it doesn't actually get into how much is it cost to build. Suppose you broke the entire population down into a few different groups who need, say, a one bed apartment, a two bed apartment, a three bed house and a four bed house, something like that. How much does it cost to build each of those types of homes and where would you have to be and what's the underlying requirement like?

17:48As I say, I haven't met a bunch of policymakers who can say, oh, yeah, we're exactly it's 23.5 percent of the income distribution and you're good. right and everyone else is is helped i'm not claiming it'll ever be that simple or that black and white but you do need to be able to say okay well if you're talking about an apartment you know only the top x percent is going to get covered by the markets and therefore we need to put in measures for the other can i give you an example around regulation in the 2010s ireland made what arguably is the far-sighted decision that every new apartment that gets built has to be an A rated.

18:24This is energy ratings. Now, in doing that, you actually make it more expensive to build the apartments. Yes. That's okay. That's a consequence of the decision you made. But think about it now from what we've just talked about, the ABC groups. You've actually moved the break-even line further away from the bottom. So you've priced at some, maybe it's a small percentage of the income. Lower income B's are priced out now. Exactly. So what are you going to do? You can't pretend that group isn't affected. Is this something we want to do as a society? Probably. It's good to have energy efficient homes.

19:00But if that's a societal good, then that sounds to me like it needs to be subsidized. You need to offer a grant for the people who would otherwise be priced out. And you can't understand the subsidies you need to do if you don't know those numbers, if you don't know that break-even cost and you don't know how much you've increased the break-even cost. And Ireland did this many times over the last 20 years, changing the minimum sizes of apartments and the energy efficiency. I'm not saying any of those decisions were bad, but you've got to make those decisions understanding what the impact of those decisions is going to be.

19:32And that's the bit I think that's missing. Okay, we're talking about building costs and changing regulations and how it's impacting on the actual final cost to the punter. What about the big issue of land cost? I mean, for Ireland, for years and years and years, there has been, I think, an understanding, an angry understanding that land is hoarded in this country, that people have bought, there's things called land banks, and those land banks are bought, people sit on them, and they wait for the price to go up, and then the price goes up, they release it. And obviously, part of the problem is land costs.

20:06You know, we are talking about still a reasonably non-densely populated place in comparison to, let's say our Dutch friends or our Belgian friends or our British friends, our English friends in particular. Yeah, so I think land and the treatment of land is a really good example of piecemeal policymaking. So I've argued for maybe 15, if not more years, that we should be introducing something like a land value tax. Land value tax would minimize the kind of behavior you're talking about, David, where somebody kind of wastefully hoards a site, hoping for some free gains. a land value tax is what's the value of that land and you tax maybe three or four percent of it a year and what you're actually doing is you're taxing the entire rent if there's a four percent yield on the land and you're taking four percent a year you're basically capturing all that income that would have accrued to that land doing that is a good idea right it will in the language of economics shift out the supply of land it'll make it cheaper it'll be going back to those figures about 550 ,000 or whatever that per unit cost of land will go down significantly what did Ireland do.

21:13Ireland sort of introduced this back in the 80s with part five contributions, and then it had some other contributions, and then it introduced residential zoned land tax, and then it introduced land value sharing. And so if you were to talk to a developer today, they would say a huge amount of their land value is taxed away, but that they're not really in this for the land value gains because the state is already getting a huge amount. If you talk to a land value tax purist, I'm not a purist by a matter, certainly a land value tax advocate, I would say we're not doing it right because you've got so many different bits.

21:45And what we need, again, is systemic thinking. And that's not just around taxation of land. It's also around how we use land. In the Japanese system, they have very detailed maps. Say, okay, you can go in and here, this part of Fukuoka, which is the same size as Dublin, this is what you can do. And once you meet the criteria, away you go and do it. I mean, you know, a major criteria for Japan is earthquake proof measures. Yeah. The Swiss, believe it or not, have atomic bomb shelters as a requirement for their apartments. That's a different, maybe a kind of a national hangup of theirs. I don't know.

22:21Yeah. Whatever you want to do, set out the permitted uses. Once you have that done, then allow those uses to be permitted. The clue is in the name. What we have in Ireland is a system that has both zoning, this is going to be residential and that's going to be commercial and that's going to be mixed use, but then also has a discretionary planning system. Basically, what happened in Ireland in the 60s was we looked around and said, who's doing what around how you use land? The Danes had this really farsighted system called the finger planning. I presume I butchered my Danish, it isn't so hot, right?

22:55But it's the five fingers and they're thinking about adding a sixth one of growth, transit-oriented development. Basically, they're going to build train lines from the 1940s all the way through. Ireland said, that's not really for us. What are the Brits doing? The Brits are introducing discretionary planning. Basically, every single proposal has to come to a committee, and the committee goes, yes or no. That in itself is not a deal breaker, but in the system we have at the moment where you have zoning and discretionary planning at the local level, then discretionary planning at the national level, then you get the courts.

23:27If the punters could see me now, the listener could see me, I'm actually shaking my head because I think it is a deal breaker. I think it actually constitutes discretionary planning. Seems to me, given all that you've just outlined there, nothing more than putting yet more uncertainty upon uncertainty, upon development, upon building, upon zoning. I mean, what is the point of zoning if you've got discretionary planning? Yeah, so at a concrete level, Cork and Galway cities, what are they not doing that, say, Utrecht or Gothenburg or Freiburg or Basel is doing, right? In those cities that I've just named, you have detailed plans.

24:10And if you follow the numbers, you're pretty much guaranteed to get your permit. There's some scope for objection, but it's pretty limited and it's usually the next door neighbour and that's it. And that's the whole point of having those plans. In Ireland, even, as you say, even with zoning for residential, it's too discretionary. Personally, if it were up to me, I would remove the uncertainty. Not just for developers, by the way. This is not some pro-developer move. This is also reducing the uncertainty for the existing residents. If you think about those people in Copenhagen, right, when the plan gets published in 1947, they know they're in a zone that's growing over time.

24:45It's not a surprise when the scaffolding comes. Of course, it's like the people who buy houses beside Dublin Airport and then complain about planes. I mean, you know you're buying beside an airport, right? But also another other thing is for the local authorities who are deriving income from the development, there's also uncertainty. Because, of course, when you're trying to plan your revenue as a local authority, and you're also trying to plan your amenities around it, if you kind of know that something might be built there, but we're not really too sure because there's another outfit here who may say no, then your income stream is uncertain and your planning projections are uncertain.

25:27Your amenity projections are uncertain. So it's a kind of a royal fuck up on every level. Yeah. And what that, like, if you think of the famous phrase, time is money, right? If it takes you six years to go from, we'd like to build apartments on this site in Dublin to actually getting boots on the ground and shovels in the earth and so on, right, compared to maybe six months in one of those cities I mentioned. Yeah, of course. That costs money. And that money is not being paid for by the developer or their shareholders. They are getting compensated for that. It's the ultimate residents that are paying for that.

26:01So this is the uncertainty is a tax on Irish residents. And removing that uncertainty, as I say, ideally by reforming the discretionary system so that it's much more rules-based than discretionary. Whatever it is, you've got to reduce that uncertainty if you're going to get the homes we need built. Yeah, and also, you know, if you're involved in a business where there is six-year lead time, a huge amount of very talented, energetic, dynamic people will say, fuck this, I'm going to do something else for a living. Really? Because I'm not going to be reduced to waiting for some pen pusher to tell me whether I can do this or not life is short like people's people's working careers are let's say 40 years odd right you can't be spending years of that waiting for some person who might have a bias against development or whatever to make decisions on your behalf i'd love for it to be mandatory for anyone working in housing policy they're going to say especially in ireland because it's the system i know best but even in other countries i think this would be a good idea to do an internship in a an organization that builds housing.

27:06Whether it's for-profit or non-profit is not that important, but it should be mandatory for them to do it, to understand how the process works on the other side. I sat in a meeting with, among others, some Irish civil servants, where the civil servants... Name them. Thankfully for them and for me, I can't remember their names. But somebody earnestly was worried that if they didn't set a maximum height for apartment blocks in places like Drumshambo in Leitrim, this is in 2018 or 19 that somebody would come along with the proposal for 12 stories or 18 stories or 50 stories apartment blocks in from shambo in in leitrim and therefore and because it hadn't been ruled out by the national policymaker somebody would have to say yes which aside from discretionary planning a bit right the planners could literally turn around and go no seem to misunderstand i actually said in the meeting i said have you ever been to an investment committee right try and get the 18 story tower past the investment committee This is the 18-story tower in a small rural town in Ireland.

28:08The only reason anything even close to that happened in the 2000s, in the 90s and 2000s, a six-story building, which arguably wouldn't be too tall anyway, was because of the tax breaks we talked about in the earlier episode. But then, as you say, the understanding of how the system actually works on the provision side by the policymakers, I worry a lot about that. At least in the Irish system, I think the lines are too thick between private sector and public sector. You want people to be able to go in and go out so they can get that experience. It's like, this is like looking for a lifeguard who can't swim.

28:42That's a very good description. It is, I'm just thinking about it, you know. All right, listen, we're coming to the end of our trilogy, Ron. Give us your top three practical, if we could do this now, we could get to a situation where we get, in 10 years' time...

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31:17free land and free capital, how expensive is it to build homes of different kinds? And how many do you think you're going to need of those different kinds of homes? And you can kind of figure out that bit, that line in the ABCs. The build costs, the efficiency bit is really important. The second area is around land use. Going back to the discussion we were just having there, that especially for Anglophone, Anglosphere jurisdictions where a lot of that is discretionary. And would you know what, actually, I kind of think that long dress is significant historical heritage. That actually happened in San Francisco, believe it or not.

31:55Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can I just talk to you there? We're back to Donnybrook. There is, by the way, listeners, a CIE garage for buses in Donnybrook. I know where you're going with this one. Now, I only know this very well, not because I live in Donnebuk, because as a young flower, I used to go to Wesley. Yes, we did. The rule of Wesley is you drink flagons in the church, opposite Wesley, which is also opposite the CIE bus station. So I have looked at the CIE bus station in many stages of teenage inebriation, and I have digested and taken in its architectural merits, and I can tell you it's zero, right?

32:34this site this site was slated architecturally it's a fucking bus station built in the 50s yeah the argument is that one of the people who worked in it later went on to work in the Sydney Opera House so therefore clearly it's worth preserving oh well then oh well then it has that slight opera house look not it does but anyway let's go on I'm sure the acoustics match as well exactly Exactly. So that's your second point, which is land use. Rules-based system of land use and certainty rather than uncertainty. And the third area, which we have talked a bit about across the tree, but maybe not in a kind of a single five-minute segment, is around how we do housing, that assisted group, how we do social housing or subsidised housing.

33:23And that same idea of the line between the assisted and the covered is relevant. The further away you are from break even, from being able to cover your own housing costs, the more help you need. This is known as a kind of an income varying cost rent. For example, suppose you pay 20 % or 25 % of your net income if you're in receipt of social housing. You pay that over to the housing body or the city council, whatever it is, whosoever is running the project. And however much that is short of the break even cost is the subsidy. It's topped up by the national government or whoever does the subsidy.

33:57like in 30 seconds it probably sounds reasonably complicated but actually when you work at the specifics it's relatively straightforward and the problem again not just in Ireland but in lots of countries is that you've got a multiplicity of different ways trying to make housing affordable some of them are quite costly so Ireland spends a lot of money on top-ups in the private rental sector housing assistance payments in New York and other places you get this kind of rationing of cheap housing through rent controls. What you need, again, is a systemic view, an systemic view that goes back to the ABCs, the assisted, the blocked and the covered.

34:31And you're trying to make sure everyone is either assisted or covered. Who does this best?

34:39I still haven't found what I'm looking for. To quote a famous Irishman. As in, I don't think there's one place that has it absolutely nailed. Like there are places that in, certainly in English speaking countries that you'd kind of, you'd refer to deferentially, the V &E's cost rental system. And I do think that is a good one. There's elements of the Swedish system that people will look at, but then the Swedish rent control system or even the housing deficit among younger people is substantial. So what I would do is if I were in the US, in a city in the US or in England or in Australia, I would be looking at different places to see, okay, on that efficiency point, where are the best places, where are the most efficient places for building.

35:22On the land use point, I mentioned Fukuoka in Japan, like that rules-based system or Graz or other places in Europe. On the social housing, Vienna is an example of cost rental housing. So I don't think there's an overall, we've got it nailed. And that makes sense because every country's circumstances, every country's context is slightly different. There's a reason we talked about in the, actually this unique demographic context of it's the only place with a smaller population now than one or two centuries ago. And it's kind of catching up with where it should have been all along. That means that a solution that works in Barcelona, Amsterdam may not necessarily just copy over.

36:01So I'd be looking piece by piece rather than for holistically, you know, taking an entire system and implanting it here. Ronan, I just wanted to ask you in terms of how would a change in the legal and planning system overall change in terms of like kind of judicial reviews and that kind of stuff. How much of a blockage is that in terms of, you know, adding costs to housing? Yeah, it's not the only thing in town, as in you could probably not constitutionally ban judicial reviews or whatever it is, you'd still have lots of issues. What it did do is it added another layer and it added another element of uncertainty into a system that was already plagued by layers, delays, and uncertainty.

36:47So there are like this infamous case of, now it seems to have been resolved, of the metro, the judicial review of Dublin's new metro. If you look at how other countries do significant infrastructure or indeed housing, the judicial reviews exist in those countries, but they're almost never used in cases like that. They seem to be increasingly used in Ireland, but they're almost never used in other countries because of the way they set up earlier bits of the process. So if you've got infrastructure of national significance, it goes through a particular process, not a regular planning application, as was the case in Dublin.

37:23So there's absolutely a way, I don't think you'll ever, as I say, ban judicial reviews, nor was that your question. But we can design a system that removes the uncertainty earlier on so that you know what's coming down the tracks rather than being able to turn around at the end and go, well, hang on a sec, they didn't do their environmental impact assessment because there might be some bats, I think, or maybe they're geese. I'm not sure. It's one of the two. And therefore, the whole thing has to get quashed. On the Judicial Review, we had a podcast a while ago with a very interesting commentator called Dan Wong, who's written about China and China engineering the future.

37:56And he was trying to get his head around the Judicial Review. So he said to me, he says, so wait a sec, wait a sec, wait a sec. The basic question here is, is Subway constitutional? and he said is that what you're involving judges for and I said kind of and he goes oh man you are very far away you are very far away from getting any shit done but Rona can I ask you just before we go when we came on air here I was asking you about Christmas in the Lions family and you were saying well you know Santa arrived the kids are younger at that stage it was really really sweet and it was really lovely and all that sort of stuff.

38:37When those little children are adults, do you think that we will be closer to a solution given what you know about what is required, the scale of the problem, and you know about your understanding of the way in which policy and politics works in our benighted country? You know me, David. I'm a natural-born optimist. I really want to see the positives. But I have been basically singing the same song for 10 years now. And at the start, now what's that? I'm not Gandhi, but is it the Gandhi code where the first they mock you and then they, you know, whatever it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the start, I was talking about Ireland needing 45 ,000 to 50 ,000 homes a year.

39:18This is 10 years ago and people were like, your man's cracked. And unsurprisingly, by not building that many, the number is higher now. And we've caught up a little bit. We were building 15 ,000 homes a year and now we're building 30 ,000 homes a year. we need to be building 60 to 70 ,000 homes a year consistently for the next generation I be you know hand on heart I don't think we're going to solve it like realistically looking at our eldest is 10 now you know it's not that long until he's 20 and I just don't see like I think realistically we're going to have to plan for some kind of situation where he lives in this show in the back garden or something or else send him away right and it's it's it's not nice and people are living this now, not 10 years from now, hypothetically, people are living this now where the only way for the kids to get a meaningful start in life is to go somewhere else.

40:04And that is a different version of the problem that has plagued Ireland all along for the last century and a half or two centuries, the bulk of the last two centuries was that unfortunately we can't make it work for you here, so we're going to have to send you somewhere else. It's for a different reason now, but that doesn't make it any better. On that uplifting note, no, it is kind of pathetic. I hope I'm wrong. I really hope I'm wrong. I kind of see it as a it's the parents that are going to be moving out and the kids staying at home in the family home John will be in the damp infused shomra at the back garden railing against the world fist up like a character from Father Ted railing against society next time I'm on we can talk about the inheritocracy yeah that was a tour de force an amazing trilogy a rendition wisdom system, economics, sense, common sense, a little dig at areas that need a little dig being given to them, but ultimately a wonderful, wonderful contribution.

41:08Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me on.

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