if you didn’t climb onto the property ladder sooner, rather than later, you would wind up paying Weimar Republic prices for just a bit of shelter.

Greed ignites booms, but panic drives them.

Anecdote one. Some years ago, RTÉ Radio had a short series of 15-minute programmes where a public figure spoke about a European country they had a particular grá for. David Hanley was one of the presenters, and his country was Denmark. The reason was how private rented tneants awere treated, as told through an account of how a journalistic colleague in DK had to handle the house he owned. Mr DK got a promotion that entailed a move to another city. He decided to rent out his home in the original city, rather than sell it.

Some years later, he got transferred back to his original city, and initiated — without any grumbling — the process of ending his tenant’s tenancy. Because he had been away from a number of years, he had to give his tenant a full year’s notice and he had to go to the local court to prove that the eviction was so that he could re-occupy the house and not because he wanted to re-let it at a higher rate. Unless my memory is playing tricks (and this programme was so long ago, it could be), this court appearance was automatic, and not because the tenant objected. The rationale for this system, Hanley explained, was that the rented property had become the tenant’s home and he was entitled to strong protection of his right to that home.

Anecdote two. A decade ago, an Austrian friend put me up in his apartment in Vienna. He was renting, and we got talking about the way the system worked. Two things struck me as interesting: (a) his rent was index linked and (b) his landlord was a pension fund for one of the public sector unions. The first of these meant that when the demand for housing in Vienna rose rapidly during the Bosnian wars, his rent did not go up in pace with the rise in rents for new tenancies. (It’s possible that his rent was affected by that if that fed into the index to which his rent was linked, but even then it would be diluted.)

Anecdote three. I seem to recall — this could be checked reasonably easily, but I’m not in the mood to! — that when the law on private rented tenancies here was changed a few years ago, the minister refused to amend the bill to the maximum permitted rent increases to an consumer or retail index (do we have both of those? I became aware of the possibility that there could be a difference only this week when I saw some of the coverage of the UK budget and the linking of some social welfare benefits in it to the “wrong” one of those indices). Instead, private rents would be allowed to increase with the market for private rents.

Connclusion. It seems to me that one of the factors that probably helped with the driving up of house prices was the state of the private rented market and its regulation in Ireland. With poor security of tenure and little (indeed, “no”?) protection against exorbitant rent increases, many of those who earned too much to qualify for local authority housing were forced to play the buying game.

Here’s a breakdown in Excel. I still have to graph the figures, but you might find them interesting. The figures come from the 1970s Quarterly Household Bulletin.

There’s a great study on housing done by Tony Fahey, where he looks at home ownership and social housing in Ireland, and he talks about these government purchase schemes. He found that at least 25% of all private housing in Ireland comes from the buy-out schemes. In other words, where it not for the privatisation of social housing, particularly urban social housing from 1967 onwards, we’d be looking at private/rental housing in Ireland in the order of 60/40 - 60% private, 40% rental, about the same rate as Austria, France and the Netherlands. The majority of households would be privately-owned households, but you wouldn’t have an economy based around it.

The gas thing about the birth-rate as a factor in the housing boom is that it takes, what, at least 25 years from birth to mortgage? That would mean that Ireland should have been coming out of a 30-yr housing boom in late 1990s/early 2000s. But this was never about providing houses, it was all about providing mortgages, and if I can get that across in the book - what it means when a society has a housing policy focused on providing mortgages rather than dwellings - then I’ll be happy.