Rundale

Juliana Sassi

The restructuring of Ireland’s housing sector since the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is part of a wider reorganisation of global capital that has strengthened relations of dependency between Ireland and core capitalist economies. The hyper-reliance of successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael governments on international investors has led to a growing concentration of properties and centralisation of command and control on asset management companies and pension funds, mostly from the US.  In 2026, larger landlords owned 15 per cent of the Irish private rental sector, rising to 28 per cent in Dublin. In other words, nearly one in three tenants in Dublin rents from a large landlord.

This spatial expansion of capital, allied with the commodification of previously common goods, have long characterized capital accumulation, with finance playing a pivotal role. Operating as a countervailing force against the falling rate of profit and crises of overproduction, Rosa Luxemburg anticipated that territorial expansion—facilitated by imperialist warfare—was essential for commodity realisation, given the insufficient consumption capacity of the impoverished working class of the core. In the 1960s, Baran and Sweezy similarly identified militarism as well as advertising as critical vehicles for capital realisation during periods of profound economic stagnation within core Western industrial economies. Furthermore, they highlighted the increasing significance of the FIRE sector—Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. 

In the early 1970s and 1980s, Lefebvre, Harvey, and Castells called attention to the shift of capital investments from the productive sector to the sphere of social reproduction, such as housing and households’ consumption, and the built environment. The urban space became the space where financial capital turned its attention as a way to expand, thereby also creating the revolutionary role of the urban inhabitant in the class struggle: including students, women, as those doing the invisible work at home, but also industrial and public sector workers. Harvey, nonetheless, has followed Marx’s insights and reinforced the idea that exploitation in the secondary circuit of the economy -at the level of social reproduction- is a “secondary exploitation”, which proceeds alongside the original exploitation that takes place directly within the production process, where surplus (unpaid labour) is extracted from workers.

This theoretical detour matters for the Irish case because it shows that housing financialisation is not merely a technical supply problem. It is part of a broader historical movement in which finance capital seeks new frontiers of accumulation when profitability in production is constrained. Ireland’s post-GFC housing regime should therefore be read as a concrete expression of this wider process: the movement of global financial capital into Ireland’s rental housing through debt and rent extraction, alongside a renewed pact between the Irish state and the Irish comprador class (the local bourgeoisie who serve foreign economic interests and has close connections with imperialism and global capital). This includes state agencies, consultancy firms, accountancy and legal advisory firms. (add link to Conchur article in this SI).

Post-GFC Restructuring: Debt, Austerity, and the Rental Turn

After the crisis, housing financialisation in Ireland and many other Western countries shifted from credit expansion and household debt towards rent extraction. Supported by institutional investors such as pension funds, corporate landlords became key agents of housing financialisation through the large-scale acquisition of distressed residential assets. This opened a new phase of speculation in residential real estate, with debt serving two related purposes. 

First, institutional investors, especially private equity firms, used debt as leverage to purchase distressed assets and expand their role in the Irish housing market. Secondly, household debt was individualised while access to mortgage credit was restricted, limiting homeownership and redirecting demand into the private rental sector. This uneven allocation and dual use of debt and credit were central to the rise of corporate landlords. Debt should therefore be understood not only as a cause of the crisis or as a neutral financial instrument, but as a technology of power that mediates access to housing, redistributes wealth, and advances capital accumulation.

Although debt lay at the heart of the GFC, it has not been sufficiently politicised in Irish urban studies. The crisis was a process in which the Irish state socialised private debt accumulated by major financial institutions in core capitalist economies. In other words, Maurice Coakley observes, the Irish state assumed liabilities that served primarily to protect major European and US financial institutions, a process strongly encouraged by the European Central Bank and other international actors. The socialisation of financial institutions’ debt thus became the precondition for a new phase of financial accumulation centred on housing through accumulation by repossession.

To protect these global financial institutions, the Irish state also accepted the austerity measures imposed by the Troika, deepening and extending neoliberal restructuring in Ireland. By 2010, this transformation was already being described as a new form of dependency – perpetuated by structural imperatives inherent to the expansion of global capital alongside domestic policy frameworks, and evidenced by the subordination of national policy priorities to foreign capital and imperialist dynamics As one commentator in The Irish Times observed, “Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund”. Ireland was increasingly portrayed in European financial discourse as one of the EU’s peripheral economies, prompting Coakley to ask whether this represented a continuation of the country’s longer history of dependent development. Either way, for Coakley, financialisation provides a crucial backdrop to the structural crisis affecting European economies and has given rise to neo-imperialist relations among core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral nations. 

Ireland’s Dependency and Housing Policy

To restore confidence in international capital markets while responding to the housing crisis under austerity, successive Irish governments led by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil established an institutional and regulatory framework intended to attract global finance. This strategy closely paralleled Ireland’s long-standing reliance on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as a mechanism for generating GDP growth. Although the locus of investment shifted from the productive and services sectors to the sphere of social reproduction, the underlying developmental model remained largely intact: tax and regulatory incentives were deployed to mobilise foreign capital to address domestic needs. In this context, the assumption that neither the national bourgeoisie nor the Irish state could provide housing at scale remained uncontested by both the state and Ireland’s comprador class.

The Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and Irish Real Estate Fund (IREF) regimes, introduced in 2013 and 2016, respectively, became central mechanisms for retaining institutional investment in the private rental sector. These regimes offered extensive tax advantages, including exemptions on dividends and, particularly in the case of REITs, on portfolio disposals. This policy shift led Rory Hearne to characterise the process as a form of neo-colonisation of Ireland by US firms. 

The new policy landscape was fostered by Rebuilding Ireland (2016), an emblematic housing plan that, for the first time, positioned long-term renting as an explicit matter of public policy and sought to reshape prevailing negative assumptions about rent. Housing policy underwent a cultural turn that promoted renting as a flexible and desirable form of tenure. Yet this shift was directed towards a particular ideal type of tenant: a young, mobile professional class who would rent long-term and remain geographically flexible. Such flexibility closely corresponded to the broader flexibilisation of the workforce, which both labour and housing studies understand as a process of precarisation. Tenants on the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) were also considered social housing tenants, with landlords being subsidised by the state, which covers market rent through public revenue.  

One could question what the difference is between renting from a corporate landlord and an Irish private landlord. Isn’t the tenant’s situation precarious in both cases? For sure. The main distinction lies in the dependent nature of ongoing housing financialisation, how it reproduces Ireland’s development strategies, and how that shapes the management of national resources and the population’s needs and aspirations. 

IRES-REIT, Ireland’s largest landlord, is backed by BlackRock, Inc., Fidelity Investments International, and other European companies such as Asset Value Investors Limited from the UK. Urbeo, for example, is backed by the giant US-based Starwood Capital Group, while Kennedy Wilson, a billion-dollar real estate company, is financed by major global financial institutions, including BlackRock, Inc., Vanguard Group Inc., Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd, Morgan Stanley, and the Goldman Sachs Group. While Goldman Sachs became known as one of the catalysts of the GFC, BlackRock and Vanguard, along with State Street, are known as the “Big Three”. Together, the three manage over 90% of all assets under management in passive equity funds, and constitute the largest owners of 438 of the 500 most important American corporations on the S&P 500. The Big Three are also among the 10 largest shareholders in Europe and East Asia. Asset managers operate as universal owners: though they are not the ultimate owners, they are investors who hold stakes in virtually every company and thus a slice of the entire economy.

Politically, corporate landlords such as Kennedy Wilson and IRES REIT are also organised as members of Irish Institutional Property, a representative body that lobbies for the sector. Drawing on data from the website Lobbying.ie, IIP has submitted 157 applications from September 2019 to August 2026. This figure is up from 138 lobby applications in September 2025, which averages to 2 per month. Of those 138 applications, 112 aimed to influence public policy and government programmes; most were sent to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, followed by the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Finance. While any civil society organisation can lobby the government, CLs have exercised this right actively and in a coordinated manner as a class through the IIP.

International institutions have also remained closely involved in shaping housing legislation. The Housing and Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026, followed government consultation with a series of organisations, including the OECD and the IMF, while tenants’ organisations and tenant and homeless advocacy groups’ concerns over affordability and security of tenure were not taken on board. 

Rather than simply reflecting the technocratic character of the Irish state and its economism, which neglects anything that cannot be translated into calculable market terms and logic, it is an expression of Ireland’s dependent developmental model. Here, as Harvey has said, “formalized human practices are manifest in a structure of financial and governmental institutions which … create the basis for class-monopoly power in the land and property markets”. 

Implications of dependency analysis

The prominence of these powerful institutional investors illustrates the significant influence of global financial capital within the Irish housing sector, opening the way to viewing Ireland as a postcolonial- dependent nation that has kept its subordinate role in the world economy. As scholars have demonstrated, the centralisation of asset management command and control has deepened global core-periphery structures of dependency among countries. They have also alerted to how global institutional investment in housing exacerbates existing economic hierarchies, shaping uneven development at the urban scale in a geographically uneven landscape of capital flows, aggravating the existing divides between core and non-core global financial markets. In the Irish context, it means a continuation of the state’s retreat from building the national housing stock and the systematic sale of public land and real estate, including residential, to global financial capital. Such rationally gained shape in the form of national policies to attract investors and inefficient tenant protections, which does not address tenants’ greatest concerns: affordability and security of tenure. On the other hand, the latest housing policy has tripled the profit of Ireland’s largest landlords: IRES REIT, which has delivered those as dividends to international shareholders, moving profit abroad.

This process is symptomatic of a contemporary form of imperialism, characterised by the global extension of finance’s monopoly power through (rent) extraction and the establishment of new relations of dependence and subordination among countries. It reflects an advanced stage of capitalist development in which accumulation increasingly depends on new frontiers for extraction within nature and everyday life amid stagnation in core capitalist nations; a stage which as never before relies on growing inequality, militarisation, and socio-ecological disaster in order to survive. 

Thus, to de-financialise housing, Ireland must face its subordinate position; take control of the Irish housing stock and build a sovereign housing policy to address the population’s needs. This is unlikely to come from the comprador class and the political class that represent them. As per Marxist dependency theory, this is because, although subservient to international capital, their economic gains are not minor. Their interests are disconnected from the majority of the population. It seems that a mass housing movement is the only way toward housing de-financialisation and de-commodification in Ireland, and a necessary step to challenge Ireland’s dependent and unequal trajectory.