Why aren't areas like Beaumont and Walkinstown more popular.

Technical jobs tends to mean college educated engineering. What you are referring to is trade jobs. Many people get married to people with one job being better paid. What you are specifically asking is how can a low income households afford high priced property.

They can live in lower priced property in cheaper areas which are either less desirable or further away from areas of high employment of people with higher incomes.

You were giving out about snobbery but the reality is that make property cheaper for those on lower incomes. You also think a trades person could do up a property and either make money or end up with a better property.

What other way do you want it to work? Why should 2nd hand properties in a well established area not be sold for as much as possible?

There is likely trouble ahead as AI is going to decimate the IT industry and in particular those entering the job market. A lot less need for junior staff is coming

I think you may be off on the importance of IT as it is well over a decade and more like 3 decades and helped fuel our economy. Ireland used to be the biggest producer of software in the world. The IT industry used to be about processing information to make work easier rather than replace people the change with AI will be very different. This will replace peoples' jobs and is easier to do it than before.

The new term coming out is Prompt Engineer which will pay well for a while but will be obsolete relatively quickly as AI gets better. I'll get to retirement before it really affects my job. There area ton of clueless IT staff that were used to fill jobs because there was a lack of people with proper training/aptitude. IT is going to revert to where only the very skilled get the high wages with tons of roles being diminished. I have met plenty of developers and met a lot of "coders' too and there is a difference

Hmm. Maybe it's akin to how the quality for "builders" back in the Celtic Tiger days was abysmally low because the demand was so high.

On a national, population-wide basis? No.

When you're in the market for houses in Dublin? Yes, it is, unequivocally so.

But I was more referring to the fact that in the second half of the 20th century we covered enormous swathes of the city in a type of housing that was ultimately unsustainable.

You don't quite get it. The barrier to entry for such jobs is low. If demand is high causing the salary to go high lots more people can change over easily. Unlike with IT where there is a large barrier to enter, a degree + years of experience hence people can't just change over to it easily. A trade that takes 2 years to learn is a semi skilled job. Right now it is cheaper for me to hire somebody to do a job than do it myself but I can do plumbing, carpentry and electrical work. I even have a qualification in electronic design.

Lots of jobs are already dumbed down and have a lot further to go. Car mechanics are going to reduce a lot as EVs come in as there are less moving parts, working behind a till no longer even requires basic math skills or cash handling. Repairing components on all machines is massively being reduced where they just pull out one unit and replaced it.

I get you think working with your hands and trade jobs are salt of the earth type workers but they are easily replaced by others and are not going to shoot up in wages ever. I have friends that calibrate medical equipment and they aren't highly paid nor highly skilled jobs. The people that designed the diagnostic tools are paid well as are those that design the machines themselves. Unless machines break very regularly we aren't talking about a lot of employment either way. I worked in retail software and a till could easily never have any hardware problems for 5 years. When one broke we just replaced the entire till and brought the old one back and maybe repair it but often just throw it out because it was cheaper. We could also just send out a till and have the store manager install it as everything was colour coded

Just because people can't come to terms with their working class upbringing doesn't make me a troll

https://tus.ie/courses/industrial-electrical-engineering-apprenticeship/

A valid point. However, like for like means comparing what was average for the time with what is average today. Yes, houses back then were primitive, but that's all that there was. Today, things like double glazing, multiple bathrooms and other such things are standard.

In the 70s, someone on the average wage (I think it was around 5k a year in the 70s) would have been able to afford an average house in Dublin. To afford the same house today, a family would need to have an income greater than the average industrial wage.

To be clear, I'm not one of these people who say that the past was a glorious time, but it is demonstrable that housing has become less affordable than it once was.