Irish Examiner view: Scarcity not the only rub with houses

The ESRI report highlights a glaring flaw in our collective psyche which see us regularly overbid, thereby also inflating property prices, when embroiled in the bidding systems used for home buying here. Picture: iStock

Given the scale of the housing crisis and the shortage of any meaningful solution, at least in the short term, it comes as no great surprise that house prices continue to rise as demand far outweighs supply.

The latest figures from the Central Statistics Office show property prices rose 6.6% in the 12 months to November, with the median home price in the same period at €384,000. It’s a depressing trend that has only been going one way — up.

However, a report published today by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ERSI) shows that it’s not just the economics of supply and demand that is driving up prices, it’s a little more complex.

We’ve all paid over the odds for goods and services. It is part of life, and accepted as such. But, when it comes to profoundly important purchases, such as buying a house, the room for making errors and spending more than we should unnecessarily narrows considerably.

Worse again is when we lose the run of ourselves and are sucked into a situation where we overstep our budgetary limits, sometimes in our desperation to close a deal on anything, from a dream home to a simple roof over our heads.

The ESRI report highlights a glaring flaw in our collective psyche which see us regularly overbid, thereby also inflating property prices, when embroiled in the bidding systems used for home buying here.

According to the study, open auctions, either via estate agents or online platform, tend to encourage people to exceed their budget or pay more for a property than what they thought it was worth, especially when compared to a sealed bid process. The findings suggest that the housing market in Ireland represents a complex of behavioural, informational, and procedural challenges that many people are unable to comprehend fully.

Complicating the matter further are instances of “ghost bidding”, an illegal act where non-existent offers are used to inflate sale prices, which as many as 14% of prospective and active buyers believe they have been subjected to, and one in three of those not yet dipping into the market believe they will encounter.

Ireland’s housing crisis is bad enough without being added to by confusing and opaque purchasing procedures, and maybe it is now time for the Government to act to stamp out practices which are unnecessarily creating inflationary and individually costly parameters.

Buying a house is already challenging enough.

Landfill or money pit? 

There are growing calls for Cork County Council to come clean on the money it is spending on the mothballed landfill superdump at Bottlehill site, some 20km north of Cork City.

Supposed to open in 2009, the site has soaked up some €50m to develop and has never seen a single bag of rubbish deposited. The development was controversially put on the back burner because the then county manager ruled that the council could not compete with the charges being levied by other local authority-run landfills across Munster.

However, that decision has come with a substantial cost; not alone were there the development costs, but the maintenance and security of the site has also mounted exponentially. The council has thus far been reluctant to quantify the amounts involved.

However, as revealed in today’s Irish Examiner, the council paid some €1.9m in bank loan repayments and a further €400,000 on security in 2024 alone.

These are very substantial sums of money for a body which is constantly moaning about its budgetary commitments, and it is understandable there are growing calls for the local authority to offload the Bottlehill facility and cut its losses.

There are many other services that could be funded by this money, and even the mere recouping of taxpayers’ money would be seen as a successful outcome. Perhaps too — as has been suggested in these very columns — the land could be redesignated for housing at a time when provision of same is one of Ireland’s hottest political potatoes.

Either way, something needs to be done about the Bottlehill site which, instead of becoming a facility for swallowing refuse, has become one soaking up copious amounts of public money without any possibility of it being recouped.

Stop Putin's shadow fleet

The majority of money funding Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine has come from its oil reserves, but global sanctions on the exporting of the hugely valuable commodity have largely been overcome by the Kremlin’s use of a so-called “shadow fleet” of tankers.

This has been hugely frustrating for those trying to stymie the flow of Russian oil around the world, but a new European initiative is proposing an outright ban on services needed to ship it, such as insurance and transportation.

Such a ban would seriously ratchet up the sanctions already imposed on Moscow’s oil industry and its suggested implementation comes at a time when 14 European nations also agreed to go after the shadow fleet operating in breach of international maritime law.

It has already been reported that the country’s oil revenue plummeted by as much as 50% in January by comparison with the same month in 2025 after tough new sanction imposed by the US Treasury. This, combined with India’s apparent agreement to halt Russian oil imports in favour of imports from the US and, potentially, Venezuela, is putting a massive strain on Moscow’s ability to fund its war against Ukraine.

If imposed, the proposed new European plan could impact nearly half of Russia’s oil exports, about 3.5m barrels a day. Since the war began nearly four years ago, they have been exported through EU waters via the Baltic or the Black Sea and mostly bound for refineries in China, India, or Turkey.

It is not yet clear if the European maritime services ban will be passed, but it seems like an effective way of stemming Russia’s income at a time when peace proposals are reaching a critical point, and the Kremlin’s arm may need twisting.

If Russia does have an Achilles’s heel, this might just be it.

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