Social housing's role in the Irish property boom and bust

This paper argues, however, that the economic role of social housing has been fundamentally transformed over recent decades. The nature of this transformation plays an important part in understanding Ireland’s property boom and bust, and in understanding the nature of the current crisis in t he social housing sector. As elsewhere, the crisis commenced following the bursting of a pr operty bubble in 2007, but worsened considerably with the global financial cri sis the following year and resulted in the Irish government nationalising almost the entir e banking system in 2009 and negotiating an emergency loan from the European Uni on and the IMF to fund public spending and the bank bailout in 2010.