Cost rental is a form of intermediate housing introduced for households who earn too much to be eligible for social housing, but not enough to afford private rents. The Government wants to build 2,000 cost-rental units a year. It is used across Europe, most famously in Austria.

But Ireland has been here before.

In the 1920s, Dublin Corporation started building houses at scale for the working classes. These would be let at “economic rents”, meaning one that met all the costs of construction, maintenance and corporation loan repayments. Marino (1927) and Cabra East (1931), both on Dublin’s north side, are examples of “economic rent” housing.

At the time, civil servants adopted an approach of lower standards for what they saw as the lower orders. “Halls, parlours, hot-water systems and back entrances” were “unnecessary luxuries for former slum dwellers”, they wrote to each other, Mary Daly recalls in The Buffer State: The Historical Roots of the Department of the Environment. (Considering that 80 per cent of cost-rental and social housing is sourced today from the private sector, the historical resonance was hard to ignore when, in 2025, the current Government removed balcony requirements, and weakened light, ventilation, space and other standards for new private housing developments.)

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In the 1920s, hot-water systems and bathrooms were omitted from some Marino housing but retrofitted two years later. Costs were still considered excessive, which would necessitate........

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