A century of housing privatisation: the case of Ireland

Housing sectors around the world are in the midst of crisis as many citizens struggle to access affordable places to live. This follows decades of change whereby the role of government in housing sectors has diminished, while the combined processes of financialisaton, privatisation and marketisation have had greater influence. In this chapter we focus on privatisation in its most explicit form, namely the sale of public housing. We conduct an in-depth, historical analysis of the nature, evolution and impact of housing privatisation in a single country - Ireland. Our case study shows that the sale of public dwellings to tenants can be traced back to the early twentieth century and owes little to the influence of neo-liberal policies that became popular in the 1980s. In proportional terms, the scale of sales in Ireland has been far bigger than the UK's “Right to Buy” programme. Unlike the UK however, public housing stock in Ireland has not decreased as more dwellings were built or acquired. Although the sale of public housing is in decline, other forms of privatisation such as public-private partnerships are now being used to deliver social housing.