Ireland is no country if you’re young, creative or homeless | Una Mullally

The capital's skyline is filled with cranes. They can't disguise sky-high rents, a cultural brain-drain and growing inequality

There's a reason that "Was it for this?" remains one of WB Yeats's most recited fragments of poetry in Ireland. The line comes from Yeats's September 1913, which poured scorn on how the greed and hypocrisies of the business class had replaced the romanticism of previous Irish generations.

Ireland's modern dismay, however, is at rampant and growing inequality, and the way in which its cities and cultural spaces are being hollowed out by speculation, gentrification, poor or absent planning and squandered opportunities.

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