When I was 22 I applied for a job in Dunnes Stores, Rathmines. During the interview in a small office above the supermarket, a manager looked at my CV. “Seems fine – can you start tomorrow?” I was in luck. They needed someone.
It seems a similar level of scrutiny applies to roles paying significantly more than what I earned making breakfast rolls. Till last week Nama CEO Brendan McDonagh was to receive around €430,000 for his job as “housing tsar” tasked with solving Ireland’s housing emergency.
Housing minister James Browne was so keen to appoint McDonagh he failed to notice some things. Had he checked the Land Registry and planning records he would likely have discovered McDonagh used aliases like "PB McDonnacha" and "Padraig McDonnacha" during property transactions, obscuring his ownership of a house in Dublin. If he’d done some more digging he might’ve noticed McDonagh has been renting out this property to tourists for €10,000 a week. McDonagh withdrew his name from consideration for the role hours after we asked him for comment.
Maybe the Department of Housing was so lax because, like Dunnes Stores, it simply needs someone. Homelessness – now exceeding 15,000 people as per the latest figures – hits record highs every month. Statistics released last year showed that 41 percent of young people aged 18 to 34 live at home with their parents. Meanwhile, as of October 2024, investment funds had acquired 46 percent of all apartments built since 2017 – letting them at exorbitant prices.
Of course, there's another potential explanation. Brendan McDonagh is one of the boys – and there was a job for him.
Sold to the highest bidder
In 2009 the Free State government – at that time Fianna Fáil, the Green Party and the Progressive Democrats – established Nama. Its function was to take toxic loans from Irish banks that debtors were going to have difficulty paying back during the property crash. This was a significant project - by 2012 Nama owned assets worth almost 50 percent of Irish GDP, The Week in Housing blog pointed out a few years ago.
The same blog highlighted that instead of considering the social consequences of how it handled such a vast horde of properties, Nama ran as a private company – focusing on balancing its books, seemingly at any cost. Under McDonagh's leadership the agency sold off its portfolio to international investors and directed development in the interests of foreign capital. According to the UN 90 percent of assets Nama sold went to US private equity funds in 2019 alone. Walk through any Irish city and you can’t avoid Nama's legacy: properties yielding profits for faraway shareholders at the expense of ordinary people.
McDonagh thinks this is good. Speaking to the Oireachtas finance committee in 2014 he argued that Nama’s sole responsibility was to get the highest possible price for the assets it had accumulated – regardless of who bought them or what they did with them afterward. "The imposition of conditionality in the sale of loan or asset portfolios,” he said “would have the effect of reducing the pricing achieved and would also reduce the number of bidders willing to participate in sales processes."
As Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman has said, these funds were deliberately "waiting to see how beaten-up people's psyches get and where they're willing to sell assets." Private equity firms targeted Ireland while it was vulnerable and Nama facilitated it. Fianna Fáil wants the public to believe the CEO who presided over and encouraged this brigandage would fix the housing market – even as he currently profits from it with his short-term let.
This is it
Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the independents who prop them up have abandoned any pretence of caring about housing. For those in power, housing is an asset that must perpetually increase in value.
But this is it. Appointing McDonagh would be like letting Michael Lowry sit in both opposition and government. Like giving Michael Healy-Rae a role in the department of agriculture while he’s “sceptical” of climate change. Like our minister for foreign affairs Simon Harris pretending not to know about aircraft illegally crossing Irish airspace carrying munitions for use in a genocide in Gaza.
McDonagh will be replaced by someone else. Likely someone like him.
