It’s true, of course, that housing supply is an urgent problem in other European countries. Read, for example,on the crisis in Berlin in Saturday’s Irish Times, and much of it will seem all too familiar.
Over the last decade, an average of €4.3 billion has been spent each year on commercial real estate in Ireland. Last year, the figure was €6 billion. Even from a purely commercial point of view, this makes no sense. The take-up of office space in Dublin in the first quarter of this year declined by 42 per cent on the same period last year. Vacancies rose from 8 per cent to 13 per cent.