Baby boom generation starting to retire in or around 2030

No generation in history has ever had he reasonable expectation of settling down where they grew up. The eldest son inherited the farm, the rest of the 10 children had to find a way elsewhere, that was 19th century Ireland.

For most of the 20th century, the same prevailed, as Irish people took the boat. This continued up until the early 1990s. Even when people did stay in Ireland, places like Finglas, Ballybrack, Tallaght and before them, Cabra, Drimnagh and Whitehall were new communities and people moved out to those locations.

The amount of land is finite, the number of people is not, so the only solution is for people to keep moving outwards and/or onwards. The amount of available land for development in Dublin City Council area or in Dun Laoghaire is very small, non-existent for typical semi-detached houses, with only apartments likely there.

To sum up, in a growing population, it is impossible for any other than a tiny minority (most of whom's parents die young and leave them the house) to hold the reasonable expectation of settling down where they grew up.

I was born in the mid-1960s in well-off South Dublin, I own a house in Dublin 15 (not Castleknock).

Yes, this is the thing I've been trying to get over: the idea that we can all live better than our parents, while still being able to pick things from their lives that we'd quite like to keep is not realistic. It's not even a realistic view of the past. It seems to be some sort of view of 1950s America applied to Ireland - and even in America it was only ever true for some sections of society, basically those who managed to get into the white middle-class suburban part of it.

I suppose growing up in Derry where the legacy of two, three or more FAMILIES having to live in the same two or three bedroom house was still only in the process of being solved when I was young may help explain why I'm so sceptical of this poormouthing about how terrible it is today - but I don't believe the west of Ireland or working class Dublin was that much better. When I went to university in Dublin in the 80s I saw a lot of visible poverty - and if it struck me as looking poor compared to Derry, then it was not just relative poverty.

(TBF I think it was socially divided, rather than poor overall - the wealthy parts of Dublin were of course very wealthy. But Sheriff Street, the North Wall, Gardiner Street or Dolphins Barn were very obviously poor.)

As a relative outsider looking in, I think the returned emigrants of the Celtic Tiger years brought a lot of "WASP"-ish attitudes back from the anglophone countries to which they'd gone off, and I'm not sure those were a great fit for the Irish psyche - which I would describe as being much more aligned with the "sure-it'll-be-grand" attitude of the Mediterranean countries. I don't think it was coincidence that we were all lumped together as "PIIGS" during the bailout years.

A couple of decades on, though, I'd nearly go so far as to say that the other members of that group have recovered their traditional culture in a way that hasn't happened in Ireland, and that's despite them having an "immigration problem" that's way worse than Ireland.

The key difference I see comes back to the money markets, and the Irish willingness - almost determination - to borrow as much as they can possibly get (not afford) just to outbid their own kind … and then blame it on the banks, on Angela Merkel, on the government of the day, for causing it to happen. This is also why I don't see any Irish government bringing meaningful change to the sale of property - because anything meaningful would (should) have a significant negative effect on house prices, and that'd be too bitter a pill for any voter to swallow when they still have 20 years of a 500k mortgage to pay off.

And yet, for a country that was so characterised by emigration and literally founding and building towns and cities of other countries around the world for more than a thousand years, "Gen X/Y/Z" has suddenly developed a fierce aversion to leaving the comfort zone of Modern Ireland (and ex-pat enclaves).

So much easier to complain (in English) about not being able to afford a house without a 500k mortgage, and having to work full time till 65 to pay for it, than to learn another language and buy a house for 50k somewhere not-in-Ireland; and then be debt-free and semi-retired from the age of 45.

Food isnt overpriced...ye feckers are getting that way too cheap!

You are absolutely right, and there will be a price paid for the people who wanted to live their lives on top of mountains in the middle of nowhere, far from services. As the population gets older, the only efficient way to provide services will be in towns and cities. Living at the end of a boreen isn't practical.

Time spent in education delays the start of your full-time earning career, obviously, and equally it delays progress up the ladder of experience and earnings. But it's also associated with higher earnings, and in particular higher peak earnings, and on average it increases overall career earnings — i.e. the effect of the later start is more than outweighed by higher earnings later on. But:

1. You may be unfortunate that the years when your earnings are delayed/lower coincide with a rapid change in, e.g., house prices. If house prices undergo an irreversible step-change upwards relative to earnings in those years, you may find that you can never afford the housing that those who entered the workforce just a few years before you were able to afford. But:
2. If that happens, it's a transitional thing. It affects those who were in further education or in early-career lower earnings while the house price change was actually happening. It doesn't mean that the next cohort will be further disadvantaged by spending more time in education, or that they can avoid the problem of higher house prices by not spending time in education. Spending time in eduction will only further impede house purchase if house prices continue to rise, relative to earnings. If house prices fall relative to earnings or just keep pace with earnings then, once again, time spend in further education will tend to result in housing being more affordable to you, not less affordable.

Here we go again with the boomer greed! Boomer means something specific and it is not literal. We don't have them in Ireland. A huge amount of the population in Ireland well into the 80s lived in sub standard housing by today's standards. And even those who got mortgages in the late 80's and into the mid nineties often had to navigate punishingly high interest rates. I got burned badly in the crash of 2008 and some of my peers took their own lives.Many others became depressed and never recovered fully from it. Several colleagues who bought relatively cheaply in places like Portlaoise and Carlow realized they didn't want to live their lives in those places and gave over their entire redundancies to walk away from the mortgages. What your doing is trying to direct blame on to someone who doesn't deserve it. Your argument is fallacious because it amounts to 'We need to tax the f#ck out of that generation so my generation can live like that generation.

The published data seems to confirm that (highter earnings associated with higher income), but even though I can't see any significant holes in the data, I can't reconcile it with what I see in real life. Of my four children, one has a masters, one has no third level education and the other two have unvarnished undergraduate degrees. The one earning the most is the one with no third level education; the one with the most secure accomodation and relationship status is the one who shoved his masters down the back of the sofa and opted to follow his low-paid childhood dream job instead.

And when I look across the full spectrum of my children's peers - nephews, nieces, classmates, and random young people in my own social circle - there doesn't appear to be any association between third level education and "quality of life" … unless it's an inverse relationship.

I would be inclined to the opinion that the positive correlation we've been told about (with proof!) is based on out-of-date models, and the picture will change over the next decade. To some extent, I would also be inclined to believe that that's due to government and educational institutions pushing this "study more, earn more" attitude in recent past decades and treating all third level education as having the same value.

Moreover, it seems to feed the "you can do better if you just wait a bit longer" narrative that pushes all of the traditional "becoming an adult" rites of passage into later and later years, with few of the promises ever being fully delivered.

Another point on time spent in education, especially for people doing post-grad work, is that it can significantly delay the start of a full time permanent position, which can impact pensions. If combined with stints abroad gaining experience, it can mean that contributions to pension schemes start later. Someone who does a degree, a masters, a PhD, then a few years postdoc gaining experience may (if they are lucky) finally secure a permanent position in their late twenties or early thirties, and this may be the point at which the pension contributions start to count. (As far as I know anyway - this is how it was described to me by a friend who went down this route.)

Someone who started work in a permanent job aged 21 will have their 40 years done at 61/62 years of age, someone who "starts" at 31 will only have 36 years contributions by age 67.

It will be interesting to see how the correlation between education and salary trends over the next decade - if I live long enough to see it :)

Or by the time you are bidding on your house with yourself and your other half at the peak of your college increased earnings, you are bidding high and contributing to house price increases

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's pure car dependency that's responsible for less healthy old age, rather that having access to one's own car makes it easy - too easy - to look for and engage with people and opportunities well beyond the range of your own legs. That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing (and I'm in no position to complain, seeing as I'm packing up right now for a 450km commute to one of my infrequent salaried stomping grounds); but when everyone does it, and does it all the time, that degrades the slow, steady trading of favours, skills, experience, calamities and other factors that contribute to building a good solid community.

It's that kind of unofficial support network that helps elderly people continue to live happily at home even in the back end of nowhere. Trees need to be cut and brought in for the fire; done. Front door needs a hole patched up and a lick of paint; done. Potatoes need to be planted/lifted; done. Grandchild is making their First Communion in an out-of-the way country church; no problem, lift is here. Different people of different ages helping in different ways, all with the common point of not having their lives planned to the minute with health-sapping mortgage-paying, pension-funding salaried employment.

There's plenty of dispersed low density ribbon development in a lot of Europe. The CAP payment was a rural vote sop with France alone receiving half the budget in the 80s.

It's probably because we started out as an agrarian nation that there's an expectation that every middle sized town should have city level services, although many Irish towns now have a much better quality of life than the average for Dublin.

Ah here! No other country in the world allows dispersed living like in Ireland. Sounds like you haven't visited many other countries, or at least haven't stepped outside the comfort of a well-serviced urban area. The distances between "remote" locations in Ireland is tiny compared to other countries, and in other countries, there are people successfully and productively living in places that would make the back end of Cavan or Leitrim look positively crowded.

As for the "climate impact" argument: that ignores the fact that - if it's done in the traditional way - rural living has no more of a "climate impact" from transport than the actual practice in (Irish) cities. I find it shocking the amount of driving that my suburban Dublin family and friends do, every single day, and a slalom along any road in any estate shows that they're not the only ones. So many one-person short trips in a car ... The "country way" is to make every journey worth the cost, so both users and providers of local services work together to achieve an efficiency that I've rarely seen in any British or Irish urban context.

On the other hand, if you have people who want and try to live a suburban lifestyle in a big house in the back end of nowhere, well that's back to the "having it all" situation again, and that (IMO) is the bad attitude which the Irish-in-Ireland seem so proud to encourage.