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The housing market as seen by a mid 2022 First Time Buyer

There's quite a lot of narrative going around at the moment about house prices, much of it pub talk, so worth talking about my experiences as an FTB in the current market. The background is that I've wanted to buy for years, but with values climbing above 200k for a 1 bed after 2019 and about 225k and up for a 2 bed at that time, I realised that I needed at least 22k for a 2 bed (with a subsequent mortgage of 200k) or 40k for a 1 bed (because at the time, there was a 20% deposit demanding for 1 beds). So I think I started seriously saving in 2018, and by mid 2019 had around 25k saved. The bank wouldn't even let me apply, telling me I needed more cash on hand to cover legal costs. This put me off the process, so I decided to save another 6-7k as prices were rising at such a pace even then, that I would also have needed another 2-4k to cover the higher property costs there would be within even 6 months. And then there was a by-election, Christmas, and then a general election....
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Why the Rent Reductions bill won't work

 PBP introduced a rent reduction bill which was defeated on 14th July 2022, but unfortunately the media narrative around it focused on the politics and ideology rather than the bill itself. This bill was defeated on that debate, but frankly, the bill itself was both the cause and victim of the kind of partisan narrative that fails renters. The bill does 2 things: it sets up a body that will determine rents, and then designates what criteria will be used to determine rents. The body will be made up of "tenants" and "employee representatives." Tenants of what? We have at least 6 different kind of tenant in Ireland: local authority, approved housing body, cost rental/affordable, private rented sector (whole unit), student, and private rented sector (living with landlord). The bill does not say which tenants should be represented. I can only assume "employee representatives" means trade unions but what trade unions? What about representation for non union work...
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Nobody wants to talk about Belmullet: why?

 Last week an article appeared in the Irish Times about the extraordinary case loads that occured in the LEA of Belmullet in Mayo.  Mayo, as some might know, had one of the lowest Covid 19 caseloads in the country until December of 2020. On 14th Jan, RTE reported that the town had the highest level in the country : 6000 cases per 100,000 of population. In other words, 1 in 17 people. In the area, 760 people had tested positive in the previous weeks.  The area takes in the town of Belmullet (c.1000), Achill (c.2500) and about 8000 others in West Mayo. The surge began in Christmas week with 266 cases reported in the last 2 weeks of December.  Yet the media stayed silent. On 22nd Jan, Irish Times chimed in with a detailed, and honest evaluation of the situation in Belmullet , including discussions with public health experts in Mayo and Galway, who all expressed the same thing: the problem resulted from a particular pattern of socialising in the area, which included a s...
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The erasure from collective consciousness of government briefings in December 2020 - a lesson in listening

Its no surprise to see the media flooded with hand wringing "why didn't the government tell us" howls, when talking about the huge rise in rates in Covid 2021 between 30th Nov and 22nd Dec. But in fact, the government told you, over and over, that like speed limits, lifting of restrictions was permission, and not a target for hedonism on a grand scale. Here are just a few examples. Back in March, the country became familiar with the wonderful Liz Canavan, who is the most senior official at Department of the Taoiseach, and has been for many years. Had the media bothered continuing to listen to Canavan, instead of obsessing over every minutiae the then Taoiseach, and soon to be Tanaiste, Dr Leo Varadkar, might say, they might actually have noticed. For example, on Nov 30: "if you are meeting people over this period, and indeed beyond that, there will always be an element of risk. What we are asking is that you actively manage that risk – outdoors is better than indoors...
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