In any discussion on innovative solutions to the housing crisis, you get used to people citing some other city or state, typically a Scandinavian one, as the model for how to deliver housing and other critical infrastructure. It was strange then, when I was chairing the European Housing Advisory Board over the last year, to hear experts routinely mentioning an Irish housing innovation as the example that others might follow.

They were citing the Land Development Agency (LDA) and its potential to raise funding for affordable public housing. This is badly needed in cities across the European Union. It is not the only comparison that offers hope. Forty thousand new Irish homes will be built this year, which is almost 2½ times the per-capita levels of construction in the rest of Europe. Unlike other member states, we have the tax revenues to fund a variety of new building supports, which are starting to bear fruit. When they do, it will give us the appetite to do more.

As Ronan Lyons has argued, our backlog of undersupply and a switch to smaller household formations means we still need to get the rate of construction up to at least 60,000 units each year. The big question now is how we raise the necessary funding to close that gap.

Two large Irish house building companies, Glenveagh and Cairn Homes, have been raising private capital, but they will not be able to build enough units on their own. Other international funding sources have meanwhile dried up, as higher interest........

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