Home Truths: Property TV, Financialization, and the Housing Crisis in Contemporary Ireland

Abstract

This article examines how a specific form of lifestyle programming indexes both national concerns and transnational financial trends as well as diffuse social fissures in Irish life. Emerging in the late 1990s amid a construction boom, Irish property television adapted and thrived through the subsequent post-2008 crash, the concomitant implementation of austerity policies and an ensuing housing crisis. This boom-to-bust cycle was precipitated by the financialization of property within Ireland, a process whereby housing and commercial property became embedded in transnational financial market cycles. Through an analysis of three key examples of the genre, this article argues that for the most part, Irish property television seeks to hold at bay anxieties generated by a growing wealth and income disparity in the state. While this programming displays an ideological commitment to the “investor subjects” of home-ownership, increasingly the concerns of those excluded from this version of the good life are evident.