NAMA’s Long Tail
Why You Cannot Afford a Home
This year, the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) is finally set to shutter its doors. Established in 2009 as the State’s ‘bad bank’ in the immediate aftermath of the traumatic collapse of the Celtic Tiger property bubble, its purpose was to rescue the Irish financial system by absolving it of its colossal toxic property loan books that had threatened to bankrupt the country.
More than fifteen years later, its impending wind-down is already being shaped by the narrative—albeit primarily through research commissioned by NAMA itself—that socialising the losses of the property bust was largely a “success story”, fulfilling its statutory mandate to maximise asset values and return an “appropriate” and “reasonable” surplus of €5.5 billion to the public purse. This will no doubt allow the government to claim a straightforward political win and quietly close the book on an unprecedented market intervention.
However, as is predictably the case with short-run policy responses to capitalist crises, bailing out the system is never the end of the story. Instead, it merely set the stage for a far more insidious sequel and a deep social crisis that will scar Irish society for decades to come. NAMA’s real legacy was the effective surrender by the State of control over its housing and planning policies, foreclosing the possibility of an entire generation owning or renting an affordable home.
Vulture Capitalism
It is worth pausing for a moment to recall the sheer scale of the NAMA enterprise, which has now been largely memory-holed from collective consciousness. The State went on to acquire €74 billion worth of distressed property loans, incredibly representing almost half of Irish national income at the time, and suddenly became one of the largest owners of land and property in the world. In a sliding-doors moment, a different future was briefly possible, only to be slammed shut by the cold hand of Troika austerity.
NAMA’s mandate originally included a ‘social dividend’. Everything from providing affordable housing, to new community facilities and more balanced regional development was touted. But these naïve whimsies were quickly vanquished by what was in truth its only ever goal. As its Chief Executive reportedly remarked to a chuckling audience back in 2013: “NAMA is a complex business, but it comes down to a simple thing—cash”.
Out of all the distressed property sold in Europe in 2013 and 2014, NAMA was responsible for one-third, repackaged into huge portfolios and dumped onto global markets in a series of gigantic fire sales. Around 93% was purchased by foreign investors with approximately 90% sold to US private equity and hedge funds, filling their boots thanks to the wall of free money available due to global quantitative easing and the massive volumes of capital that scoured the planet seeking undervalued assets as profitable investment opportunities.
The dramatic discounts offered to these funds and the possibility of flipping their bargains for super-normal profits opened the door to a much larger assemblage of rent-seeking institutional investors, such as Real Estate Investment Trusts, to aggressively enter and dominate the Irish market. When all was said and done, your future home was now an asset class, the primary function of which was to deliver a steady stream of returns to corporate shareholders, traded on global markets in the relentless pursuit of profit.
Ideological Capture
This was no unintended consequence. This was deliberate state policy designed to attract foreign capital to rapidly reinflate property prices through the mass transfer of public wealth into private hands, all under the guise of crisis resolution. The doctrine of ruthlessly leveraging economic shocks to this end is of course well-trodden. After all, it was neoliberal ideologue Milton Friedman’s famous dictum that only a crisis produces real change and when that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas lying around.
The direct integration of local property markets into global financial networks and the immense wealth and power accumulated by international investment funds granted them unparalleled influence to bend national housing and planning policy ideologies to their will. The single largest category of asset offloaded by NAMA was development land, amounting to some 5,500 hectares, the vast majority of which was located in the Dublin region. At prevailing policy densities, these lands could accommodate more than 200,000 homes.
However, because of their global reach, this crucial resource could now be held, traded or withheld from productive use, not in response to national housing needs but in accordance with wider international portfolio management strategies. This fundamentally altered the incentive structure, disciplining the State and rendering unaccountable transnational financiers almost completely immune from local political control. As one government minister recently belatedly conceded, saying the quiet part out loud:“[housing] is about international markets. It’s actually a spreadsheet in Zurich or New York or Antwerp, more so than a builder looking at a site in Longford or Roscommon, that’s actually deciding what happens here”.
Hobson’s Choice
Due to this near-total monopoly control, the State is really left with just one policy lever available to it—to de-risk these assets for institutional investors in the hope that if we just created the right conditions to make it worth their while, they just might supply sufficient new homes to meet our housing needs. Such interventions involve both macro de-risking, which redirects public finances to match private investors’ profit expectations, and regulatory de-risking, that is, weakening regulatory requirements mostly in the planning system.
The intense pace at which such de-risking has been pursued over the past decade reveals just how much polity is now firmly in the grip of our new corporate landlords, further reinforcing the power of global actors. In a persistent attempt to close the so-called ‘viability gap’ (read, ‘profitability gap’), the government now offers a veritable feast of money-spinning tax incentives, including real estate investment trusts with zero corporation tax payable on rental income; special purpose vehicles for the minimisation of taxable revenue; non-resident capital gains tax reliefs; abolition of windfall taxes on the sale of development land; and the use of double tax treaties to facilitate efficient cross-border profit extraction.
But the systematic State patronage in support of corporate capital does not end there. In order to prop up ever-rising property prices, eye-watering demand-side subsidies such as the Help-to-Buy scheme, have delivered a €1.4 billion bonanza of public funds direct to the real estate–financial complex. This is despite successive analyses, including those commissioned by the government itself, concluding that such schemes are unfit for purpose, have greatly surpassed projected expenditure, are socially regressive and only serve to fund much more expensive homes.
The great irony here is that the so-called ‘market’ has become increasingly statist, totally reliant on corporate welfare and the melding of financial and political power with the impunity to throttle supply unless the State shows it the money. And with the metaphorical gun to its head, it duly obliges. For example, despite developers now being able to avail of a direct grant of up to €144,000 per apartment, the most recent budget further reduced VAT rates for the sector, including spending €250 million subsidising the completion of projects already under construction. The government is even prepared to take a 30% equity stake in your home through the First Home Scheme to underwrite developers’ risk. It has also recently announced plans to increase the maximum property value limits for the Local Authority Home Loan scheme by up to €55,000 because the minister was “frustrated” that not enough people are availing of public funds to match rapidly rising house prices.
Winning Every Way
While at the same time bending over backwards to make the housing market ever more profitable, the government of course also offers a plethora of other indirect taxpayer supports. Developers, for example, incessantly demand more spending on public infrastructure, including the recently announced one billion euro Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund, while at the same time benefiting from a development contribution waiver saving them approximately €16,000 per home and starving local authorities of vital income for the provision of basic community infrastructure and other services. True to form, the waiver led to a stampede of over 100,000 commencement notices, but unsurprisingly far fewer resulted in actual real homes.
Another persistent developer demand is that local authorities zone more land for housing, while also strenuously resisting the implementation of zoned land taxes intended to prevent speculative hoarding, including frequently in the courts. Curiously, it was even recently suggested that zoning more land could result in a substantial fall in house prices. Inevitably the Minister acquiesced and directed local councils to reopen their development plans in the certainty that “we are running out of actual zoned land for people to build on”. This was news to the councils, who largely did not share the analysis. The last land availability survey, completed in 2014, found that there was enough land zoned nationally for well over 600,000 dwellings. Since then, approximately 200,000 have been built.
Even the Chartered Institute of Building questioned where this diagnosis was coming from, noting the lack of data behind the proposition. The absence of evidence is of course not an oversight but a systemic feature of the housing affordability crisis, facilitating the obfuscation that protects vested interests. It would be a rather straightforward exercise to compile a national inventory of undeveloped zoned land—a mapped database already exists—but there is simply no political will to do so. The reason is simple. Land zoning functions as a key conduit for speculative finance, turning green fields into fields of gold at a stroke of an administrative pen.
In reality of course, there is no shortage. Even a 2024 Goodbody report commissioned by leading developers, concluded that there was almost 8,000 hectares of undeveloped zoned and serviced land across the country. This is sufficient to achieve the entirety of the 2030 national housing target of 300,000 new units and then some. Nonetheless, the recalcitrance of local councils to play ball has repeatedly raised the ire of government, including threats to withhold funding unless they toe the line.
Stockholm Syndrome
In response to the persistent charge that the State has become overly reliant on the market, the government is at pains to point to its record €9 billion housing budget. But this too is a Potemkin Village. Aside from incorporating many of the lucrative subsidies described above, around one billion euro goes on rental supports, such as the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), effectively guaranteeing private landlords’ income streams. Other initiatives, like the Land Development Agency’s multi-billion euro Project Tosaigh, bulk-purchase and forward-fund private schemes that might otherwise stall. Approved Housing Bodies largely operate in much the same way, leveraging State grants such as the Capital Advance Leasing Facility, to access private borrowing to acquire turnkey homes delivered through the market.
The State has thus become the property industry’s largest client, backstopping demand risk and bankrolling the revenue streams of private capital. The result is that a risible amount of direct-build public housing is constructed each year with as much as 80% procured via the market. According to Dr. Lorcan Sirr, Dublin City Council, for example, built a mere 35 units in 2024 while just 58 new houses and 150 apartments made it onto the open market in 2025 for ordinary buyers to purchase. At the same time, house prices continue to soar, rising at 7% per annum to almost 180% above their 2013 low point, with the average cost of buying a home in Dublin having now reached €600,000 and rents a punishing 80% higher than they were a decade ago. Over 17,000 people are homeless, including over 5,000 children.
So, how is this pathological state of affairs legitimated? The first trick is to airbrush history. Collective amnesia and erasing the memory of how we arrived at this pass are essential for manufacturing consent. The second is to convince everyone that there is no alternative to private capital. This is principally achieved through influential lobbyists, sometimes unwittingly, in the media, legal, planning, financial and property professions. It has now become an article of faith that Ireland needs €20 billion per annum to achieve its housing targets, providing the rationale for the government to increasingly “pivot more strongly” in its prioritisation of private capital as the State “can’t do it all on its own”.
The political pretext that public resources alone cannot deliver the required investment is essential for justifying mass taxpayer funded incentivisation of private finance. This self-imposed austerity, designed to signal to the market that government will in no way intervene to undermine asset values or crowd out private profits, of course conveniently overlooks the fact that the lion’s share of the State’s current housing budget is a giant market subvention. The upshot was the rather unedifying sight of the Irish government hosting a pavilion (sponsored by major property developers) and rolling out the red carpet by sending a powerful delegation to one of the world’s largest real estate conferences on the French Riviera, dubbed the ‘Davos of Real Estate’, in an attempt to woo foreign investment. The ‘Galway Tent’ in Cannes.
Racing Back to the Bottom
All of this explains recent changes to rent rules, which are intended to further inflate investment yields in an effort to make Ireland ever more profitable for international finance in the hope it will end its capital strike. It also further explains the incessant elite pearl clutching at the prospect of landlords ‘exiting the market’ (as if that could ever be a bad thing). But the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist. Over the past decade, the real estate-industrial complex has successfully mobilised its prodigious power to mount an unrelenting propaganda campaign to ensure the finger of blame is firmly pointed elsewhere—at planning regulation—which has now become hardwired into the national psyche.
From the post-Celtic Tiger ‘never again’ outrage at the ruinous hubris of unfettered deregulation and the then pervasive national ‘groupthink’ as to the natural efficiency of markets, the property industry have assiduously chipped away at planning regulation, marginalising democratic input to ensure the pendulum firmly swings back in favour of capital. Aided and abetted by a preponderance of neoclassical supply-side economics commentors in mainstream media, changing the way citizens think about housing supply and the planning system has been central to this project of ideological revanchism, simultaneously rendering invisible the firm hand of propertied power leading national policy by the nose.
The first coordinated salvo in this regulatory reprisal was the 2016 publication of the government’s Rebuilding Ireland strategy, which ultimately brought us, among other things, reduced build-to-rent apartment standards and co-living micro-units with hotel-like efficiency together with a fast-track planning system whereby wealthy investors, global equity and investment funds could bypass local councils and their bothersome planning democracy. This controversial system, reportedly written directly by the property lobby, lead to a surge of judicial reviews (as this was the only way citizens could resist), of which the State conceded the overwhelming majority and was subsequently abolished.
However, in keeping with the maxim of never wasting the opportunity of a crisis, this reversal only served to provide the casus belli for the next deregulatory onslaught, whereby almost all the ills of society could be laid at the feet of ‘objectors’. This is despite figures published by the Dublin Democratic Planning Alliance showing that just 0.22% of all planning permissions since 2012 have been subject to judicial review. Indeed, today legal challenges against housing have generally ceased, while challenges by property developers have increased markedly. Nonetheless, the government decided to depart on a three-year detour to rewrite the entire planning code and enact the 2024 Planning Act, which really had only one principal objective—to further degrade public participation and access to justice in the planning process.
Despite being trumpeted as a “once in a generation” reform, the ink was barely dry on this new legislation when further amendments were being introduced, again without any public consultation or pre-legislative scrutiny. These included a scarcely believable provision that would allow developers to alter unbuilt planning permissions—without restriction or the need for further approval—to retrospectively apply new design standards which would reduce the size of apartments to the equivalent of just two and a half car parking spaces. Inevitably the slashed standards were challenged in the courts, forcing a government climbdown despite previously insisting that they would be “robustly” defended.
This latest setback was, however, grist to the mill for the deregulationists who, with much gnashing of teeth, see all dissent as just further evidence of the urgent need to ‘bulldoze bureaucracy’ and ‘end red tape’ as public enemy number one. The recent report of the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce, for example, obsessively mentions ‘judicial review’ over one hundred times, prompting the government to propose new rules whereby it will cap the costs payable to citizens whom, checks notes, successfully challenge unlawful planning decisions. This will effectively make such action cost prohibitive for all but the wealthiest and the State itself.
A public consultation on the new rules received 1,400 submissions of which 98% were opposed, an inconvenient outcome which of course received almost zero media coverage. Regardless, the government seems determined to weaponize the judicial review bogeyman in furtherance of its deregulatory agenda, even if it risks further legal challenges, being declared unconstitutional or in breach of EU law. In fact, anticipating citizen challenges appears to be part of the plan. Democracy is expendable when the interests of capital are threatened.
Abundant Influence
There is a famous anecdote from the 1980s where former British Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher abruptly slammed a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on a table during a policy meeting and loudly proclaimed, “this is what we believe!”, signalling a definitive break from the post-war consensus of government intervention and the adoption of a radical neoliberal economic orthodoxy. The equivalent intellectual blueprint for today’s deregulatory zeitgeist appears to be Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s frequently dubbed ‘airport book’, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future, which argues that—rather than forty years of privatisation and the hollowing out of the state—it is overregulation that is the primary cause of the inability of advanced Western economies to effectively deliver housing and infrastructure for their citizens.
This latest media fad has found particular zealous purchase amongst elite ‘Tech Bros’ as a providential manifesto for a new AI-enhanced techno-utopian political order replete with skyscraper farms and “star pills” manufactured in space. Thanks to its billionaire-funded global network of ‘Effective Accelerationism (e/acc)’ think-tanks, which embraces fellow travellers in the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement and adjacent academics, its rhetoric has become incredibly influential, including here in Ireland, as a rallying cry for reheated forty-year-old deregulatory agenda.
Government ministers have naively downloaded and frequently stochastically parrot many of the movement’s watchwords such that we have become “hostages to process” with “gold-plated” regulations and that we need to “overhaul the system”. The Overton Window has now shifted so dramatically that the government has recently suggested introducing legislation to grant itself special emergency powers that would enable it to bypass planning law altogether and to disapply the landmark 2021 Climate Law, approved by an overwhelming majority of the Oireachtas, in the teeth of global climate and energy crisis. In fact, three times in the past four months the government has introduced legislation to exempt itself from its own climate laws to prohibit legal challenges allegedly being taken for “ideological reasons, often steeped in a degrowth agenda”.
It is, of course, no accident that the ‘abundance’ discourse seeks to distract from the real drivers of affordable housing scarcity, as misdiagnosing the problem is its primary political objective. Instead it seeks to hypernormalise a seductively simple but fictitious reality that we can solve all of our problems through mere supply-side bureaucratic fixes to governmental systems, or what it euphemistically likes to refer to as “ideas”, that don’t require any political confrontation with capital. Indeed, shrinking the political sphere and the replacement of the language and values of politics with technocracy, especially those of mainstream economics, is one of the defining features of neoliberalism.
Chief amongst these are residential zoning policies, which the movement fanatically blames for constraining supply and driving up prices. Over the past number of years, Ireland has quietly adopted many of the hallmarks of the YIMBY ‘upzoning’ playbook, including reducing minimum private amenity space for new housing in suburban locations (as also recommended by the property industry) and, of course, the forthcoming new regulations on Accessory Dwelling Units, or modular ‘Garden Rooms’, which have long been a peculiar fetish of the American YIMBY movement. Next on the chopping block is the Office of the Planning Regulator—a body established in the wake of the 1990s endemic zoning corruption scandals and that frequently intervenes to prevent new housing on flood plains—which is the latest scapegoat for allegedly delaying development.
Beyond Gaslighting
Most people have been thought to believe that more private money entering the housing market is inherently good, increasing supply and driving down prices. However, it is precisely the opposite. The more private money that enters the housing market, the more prices rise and supply is constrained. As the property industry focuses on the greatest profits rather than the greatest demand, homeownership declines, particularly amongst the young and those with lowest incomes. The result is housing policies developed in the interests of the elite, the holders of capital and their investment interests, rather than the real needs of the population, fuelling growing and increasingly acrimonious political discontent.
Capital’s takeover of housing policy is certainly not unique to Ireland but symptomatic of a wider global phenomenon whereby those on top have discovered a much easier formula for building wealth—buying up the basic tenets of our lives through the financialisaton of everything. Of course, this is not a politically palatable story, so great efforts must be made to hegemonize an ‘official story’ of the housing affordability crisis as primarily the fault of regulation. Any dissent opposing the interest of capital is therefore essentially equivalent to acting contrary to the ‘common good’. It follows, or so the story goes, that the ‘common sense’ solution for abundant, affordable housing is to make it easier for developers to build. But this policy is logically dead on arrival. The same supply mechanism that purportedly pushes down prices discourages capital from the sector. Private developers simply have no incentive to increase supply to decrease prices—a basic contradiction which is almost universally ignored.
Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing will inevitably require policies like mass direct-build, non-market public housing programmes, strict rent caps and extensive mechanisms to limit the dominance of international investors and other private equity giants. In other words, the exact opposite of current government policy. Real housing abundance calls for redistribution and an aggressive state willing to confront the interests of capital and to de-financialise housing for the public good. Unfortunately, NAMA’s legacy is a polity that is a prisoner of capital. Nevertheless, we must never forget that it is a political-ideological choice to prefer helping “the market” to provide our housing rather than doing it ourselves and that our current housing austerity is just the inevitable outcome of that choice. An alternative way forward is always possible, but the most essential first step is the proper formulation of the problem.
Image Credits: Original images sourced from www.cities4rent.journalismarena.media and www.comeheretome.com, with AI-assisted adaptations.