Housing crisis - Radical ideas needed to break cycle

YESTERDAY, as a disheartening number of newly elected and re-elected Dáil deputies indulged in parlour games, something like a cross between blind man’s bluff and a high-jinks round of charades, the real world trundled along showing that we still struggle to learn from history or find the courage to confront the fundamental issues shaping this society in the most destructive way.

Just a day before Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil politicians tried, again, to patronise and, yes, cheat us by insisting that the integrity of their generations-old quarrel outweighed their duty to build a future for this country, the ESRI signalled that it’s business as usual for young families with ordinary or even decent incomes.

The ESRI predicted that many young, and maybe not so young, people working in cities, already struggling with inter-generational inequities, are condemned to try to find homes in remote commuter belts.