Jennifer Horgan: It is natural to want more space but does it just make us miserable?

The Louvre museum in Paris. Paris is the most densely populated city in Europe. Ireland is by no means full and yet people spin the rhetoric that it is.

I'm just back from a house swap in Paris. It’s a strangely intimate experience, entering someone else’s space. For the last two weeks I’ve slept on another woman’s pillow, drank my coffee from her cup, cooked in her kitchen, tucked my children into her children’s beds.

This ghost woman, who I’ll likely never meet, is a bit like me. She has a lot of the same books on her shelves. She collects stones. She spends too much on fancy candles. But in other ways, she is very different.