Transforming Irish Home Ownership through Credit Deregulation, Boom and Crunch

Over the last decade the Republic of Ireland experienced an unprecedented economic boom, which contributed to equally dramatic demographic and housing market booms. Using data from the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions and other relevant sources, this article examines the drivers of this housing market boom and its implications for the distribution of housing wealth, debt and stress among home owners by age, income and region. The article suggests that during the Celtic Tiger period Ireland's traditionally distinctive housing policy and distribution of housing assets were both transformed and began converging with the norm in other developed Anglophone countries. Our analysis of this convergence process suggests that it was characterised by four developments: the rolling back of direct and indirect government supports for home buyers and the liberalization of mortgage markets; the globalisation of housing finance markets, of their regulation and of arrangements for the supply of mortgages; the development of distinctive housing markets in wealthy, high growth or ‘escalator’ regions and cities that operate separately from the wider national norm; and the advent of inter-generational, and, to a lesser extent, class and regional inequalities in access to home ownership and housing wealth.