"average Dublin house prices should fall to ‘the €300,000 mark" according to Many Lou McD.

Yes. If that isnt a good place to build apartments that are not reliant on cars, then nowhere in Dublin is.

The problem is getting a home anywhere is difficult, not just Dublin. If you own a pub, shop or restaurant in Dublins city centre staff are not going to be willing to commute a large distance for minimum wage, they would instead get a job closer to where they live.

That's irrelevant if there is no where left to build on.

Well the banks arent offering large LTV multipliers anymore and so I'd say people can afford it for the most part.

If the MNCs run into trouble, that could cause problems of course - but they may not. The job cuts look to have stabilised.

There are a lot of people with a lot of money in the country and the mortgages are relativley affordable, especially when contrasted against the price of rent (dead money).

Govt will increase new homes target to 50k per year, this year I believe.

Probably an acceptance they wont hit it this year or maybe next, but good to see a more relevant target.

Except the current govt are likley to be returned...

Not really an accurate bet. There are no odds currently offered on Paddy Power on the composition of the next election.

Betting on next Taoiseach has to include certain factors, will there be rotation, and if so, who first? Will the current incumbents be retained as leader?

Based on that, MLMD is bound to be favourite, because the boys in Belfast won't remove her no matter what the result if they end up in government, and secondly, if Sinn Fein are in government, they will insist on first go.

To sum up, those odds mean nothing.

Paddy Power are not the all seeing eye of politics.

Also, those odds are specific to leader, not party.

If you asked the same question to most political commentators, they would not agree that it is 3 times more likley SF will govern vs FF or FG.

The odds for SF to be the largest party are even stronger. The bookies prediction is SF as the largest party in Ireland, with Mary Lou as our Taoiseach, by quite a considerable margin.

These aren't just the odds with Paddypower either, its the same with any bookie that offers political betting.

Political commentators have no skin in the game, it costs them very little personally when they're wrong. And/or they have their own political biases. Their predictions are far less accurate than the bookies. Because when the bookies are very wrong it costs them prohibitively large sums of money.

Sinn Fein are the largest party in the current Dail, they are not in government.

Neither of the two sets of betting odds that you have produced say anything about the likely formation of the next Government.

They say a certain number of things as follows:

1. Sinn Fein are likely to be the largest party in the Dail after the next election, according to the bookies, like duh, have you seen an opinion poll?
2. MLMD is most likely to be still party leader after the next election, again duh, If Leo or MM drop seats, they are dead meat, MM will resign rather than go into coalition with SF, MM and LV have more chance of losing their seats than MLMD, therefore those possibilities reduce their likelihood of being Taoiseach, even if their parties are in government.
3. If SF do go into government , they will be the largest party and more likely to have Taoiseach post, whereas MM and LV, if they end up in government are 50/50 on who is Taoiseach first.

As I said already, the odds tell us nothing about likely government, only about what they say they are about.

Its rather hilarious seeing you tie yourself in knots trying to ignore the numbers here. The bookies figures aren't political, they're based on cold hard money. "the odds for next Taoiseach are unrelated to the odds of Sinn Fein being in government" is a genuinely hilarious line of argument of yours, you've either got no understanding of Irish politics or are deliberately trying to ignore the real world.

There is absolutely zero possibility for Mary Lou to be Taoiseach if our current government is returned.

If the most likely outcome of the next election was a return of our current government then the favourites to be Taoiseach would be one or both of Martin and Varadkar. They're not, by a long shot.

The odds for our next Taoseach tell us very explicitly who is most likely to be leading our next government. Which is Mary Lou apparently, by a large margin. Which will require SF being in government, ie a rather significant change in government.