From Guinness and Kerrygold to Joanne McNally and Fontaines DC, many aspects of Irish culture have made a serious mark in London in recent years. So perhaps it’s not surprising that in that nearby metropolis, a housing crisis is on the horizon.
Londoners, chomping on their Tandragee Tayto, think they’re already in the teeth of a crunch. But, as is often the case, it took an Irish expat in their midst to explain that they’re not quite getting it right.
“When people talk about London’s housing crisis, what they don’t realise is that it hasn’t actually happened yet,” said John Mulryan, chief executive of megabuilder Ballymore, in an interview with The Times (of London) this week. “But it’s coming. And it’s going to be a shock.”
Memorably, Ireland had an economy constituted largely of building and selling homes for a while, but dropped building entirely after that went south.
The population continuing to rise problematically, governments experimented with solutions such as vulture funds and hoping for the best, before alighting on the current plan to make councils suggest various pitch and putt courses and former dumps that could be turned into new towns.
But things are, to a moderate degree, looking up here, with completions up from 12,000 in 2015 to 36,000 in 2025. In London, things are going in the opposite direction, it seems. Private housing starts have dropped precipitously over the same decade, and based on the current pipeline, the British government’s target for London building is set to be undershot by a staggering 92 per cent.
“Completions haven’t properly shrunk yet,” Mulryan told The Times. “They will, though. And that will be the real housing crisis. It will be especially bad in 2027, 2028 and 2029 when we will suddenly see very few new-build completions in London across affordable and private housing. There will be upward pressure on pricing and rents because of a lack of supply. It will be terrible for the city.”
Of course, Mulryan builds houses for a living and is not above making a pitch for less affordable housing, among other changes he thinks will be required.
But if the numbers do portend a serious crunch in London, that could have consequences for this parish, both as a supplier of intrepid young expatriates and a place where the footloose people of the rest of the world sometimes try if London isn’t an option.
Irish business executives remember near-miss on 9/11
Golf fan Donald Trump may not remember where he was on 9/11 – he has taken to persistently claiming he was rescued by strong firefighters – but Glanbia’s executives know where they were.
Away to Idaho on important dairy protein-based business, the food company’s directors planned a stopover in New York, former Glanbia executive Michael Patten recounted in a post on LinkedIn. Breakfast was to be at the Windows on the World restaurant – on the top floor of World Trade Center North Tower, at 8am on September 11th, 2001.
At 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower, with anyone above the 91st floor trapped. Ultimately, after the collapse of the tower just before 10.30am, it became the single deadliest terrorist attack in history.
Fate intervened for the Irish delegation, however. A meeting with members of Congress in Washington emerged for Patten and the chief executive, John Moloney, decided to redirect everyone through the capital, skipping New York.
Sensing a problem on Pennsylvania Avenue, Patten recalls: “As we left quickly, we saw an aeroplane banking above the White House and moments later heard the rumbling thud of an impact, like a thunder clap. The Pentagon!”
The cohort made it home safely more than a week later.
Mathematicians rage against the machine
Ructions in the world of mathematics this week after OpenAI’s claim that its army of robot special agents solved one of the most important remaining challenges in the field: the Navier-Stokes Problem.
Accusations are flying, with another team working on the problem suggesting their work may have been spied upon.
It’s something to do with the motion of fluid. But where is the Irish angle? Stokes was Irish.
Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, was born in Skreen, Co Sligo, on that concave coast whose challenging waves attract competitive surfers today. It was there that he became fascinated with the waves he would go on to study in the abstract as a mathematician.
“Perhaps the state of things would be better pictured to the mind by thinking of a long Atlantic swell coming into a creek 20 or 30 feet long,” he wrote to a colleague later in his career in discussing a problem.
He got first-hand experience too, speaking of the “keen enjoyment of a battle with the waves when there was a good sea on”, according to a contemporary appreciation. You don’t get that from AI agents.
AI is not as well-read as it likes to pretend
What else can AI do? It’s helping scammers enter a previously underexploited niche: trying to get 50 quid off authors by pretending to be interested in their books.
The phenomenon sees an ostensibly interested person – a book club, a social media influencer, a festival programmer, sometimes even a famous author – offer some plausible-sounding praise of the writer’s latest tome. There’s no obvious phishing link.
“They just describe your work in a long-winded, surface-level way,” Dean Fee, writer and editor of recent game-themed anthology CTRL, told Overheard. “Very strange.”
Chef and writer Thom Eagle responded to a request purportedly from a book club run by Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine “to see where it went”. After some back and forth he was asked by the impersonator for £300 to have his work included in the club, which does actually exist.
“When I said I didn’t have the budget for that they offered to put me in touch with another book club with the name of a Nigerian prince,” he told Overheard.
Overheard’s favourite example targeted Mallory Thomas, an American romance author whose most recent book concerns a steamy affair on a film set in Nashville, Tennessee.
“Dear Thomas,” began the email. “I came across Le Morte D’Arthur, and the way you brought together the many strands of the Arthurian legend into one sweeping account of King Arthur, the knights of the Round Table and their eventual downfall was what stopped me.”
Nice try. Le Morte D’Arthur is not one of Mallory Thomas’s, however. It’s by Thomas Malory, who wrote it in Middle English and had it published by William Caxton, owner of the first printing press in England, in 1486.