PB February-March 2026

February-March 2026 31

By Michael Smith

Collision of Abundance

with Accountability

A critical examination of John Collison’s imported

‘abundance’ narrative shaping Ireland’s housing debate

reland’s housing and infrastructure

failures are now so glaring that almost

anyone with a platform, and above ll

a few quid, feels entitled to diagnose

them publicly. in October 2025, John

Collison, who with his brother Patrick is

responsible for Stripe — a system which

continues to bungle Village’s membership

subscription ambitions but somehow is

worth $107bn — used the accommodating

Irish Times to declare war on regulation,

planning, justice and the facts, whimpering

that “Ireland is going backwards” and that

the State had trapped itself in a “government

by agency” corner.

Collison’s essay dramatised the

sheer pace of demographic change: the

population up from 3.5 million to 5.5 million

since 1990, infrastructure and housing

supply struggling to keep up, and Dublin’s

water and wastewater networks close to

their limits. Then it identiﬁ ed what he insists

is the real blockage: power drifting away

from elected politicians towards a thicket of

agencies. Since 2000, he noted, some 300

new agencies or quangos have been created

as “islands of political power” pursuing

narrow goals.

Crescendoing, he relied on dramatic

statistics: Ireland, he claims, has Europe’s

“second fewest homes per person” and

“41 per cent fewer trains, roads and other

transport infrastructure per capita than high

income European countries”. These claims

do heavy rhetorical lifting.

The piece landed in the corridors of

power and money as if the country’s richest

(the Colllison bros are each worth $10bn),

youngest and most unprepossessing

emigrant son had hauled down tablets of

commandments from the mount.

Tånaiste Simon Harris said it was a

“thoughtful and thought-provoking piece”.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin, from whom

greater wisdom is expected, had already

pronounced to a crowd of techies at the

opening of Stripe’s new o ce complex

in Dublin: “What is killing us is delivery,

planning and judicial review. We do need

to have a real debate about the public good

versus what I might term the excessive

POLITICS

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Taoiseach Micheál Martin

declared “What is killing

us is delivery, planning

and judicial review

assertion of individual rights”.

Ireland’s cognoscenti in general

responded not to the content of the message

but to the aura of the messenger, as if wealth

itself were its own truth. It was a telling

moment: in modern Ireland, inﬂuence is a

prerogative of those least constrained by the

consequences of their own opinions. Our

media like to give their space to people with

money or power. Indeed having money gets

you space which gets you power.

In Collison’s case he doesn’t actually

have the vision, barriers to which he so

expansively wants to remove: not a cheep

from him on balanced regional development,

new towns, high quality, sustainability,

following best-practice models or anything

else of substance.

What you get from Collison is a story

whose villains are almost entirely regulators,

agencies and environmental groups. It is an

appealing narrative tailored to Ireland’s

ubiquitous visionless who ﬁnish their

evenings reﬂexively whining that Ireland’s

problem is “too much regulation”.

The Abundanceverse

It is wholly in this spirit that we now have

the quietly brilliant — brilliantly wrong —

“liberal abundance” narrative, a vision

for the US that growth and innovation can

expand the “pie” enough to lift everyone:

so dynamic policymakers spend less time

ﬁghting over how to apportion scarce

resources and more time making sure there’s

no scarcity in the ﬁrst place. In the US, Silicon

Valley libertarians discovered that moral

sounding techno-optimism sells. Journalists

like the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the

Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, who have spent

the last decade popularising abundance as a

catchall solution to everything from housing

shortages to declining birth rates, and

economist Tyler Cowen, whose Emergent

Ventures funds libertarian deregulation

projects worldwide, provide the intellectual

structure. It is funded by nutty but celebrated

tech moguls like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel;

and industrialist Charles Koch, a billionaire

bankrolling (formerly with his brother,

David) libertarian politics including the ‘Tea

Party’ when it was a thing, climate denial,

and conservative activism. But voguish

“Abundance” and “Progress” are not organic

intellectual developments but the latest

rebrand of Kochism, laundering deregulation

through moral-sounding language like “well-

being” and “progress”.

This rebrand emerged after the Koch

network became toxic in the early 2010s,

and was consciously designed to obscure its

origins.

Though this stu is promoted by so-

called leftists much of it was formerly known

as Thatcherism and then neoliberalism.

Laundered into Irish commentary by the

Collisons as their hellspawn think-tank

progeny Progress Ireland — to which they

have contributed over $1m — and their

network of addlepate sympathisers, it

threads naturally into their collective non-

vision. The Collison brothers are active

collaborators in an ecosystem that includes

Cato, Emergent Ventures, Works in Progress,

Roots of Progress, and Institute for Progress.

Tyler Cowen — co-author with Patrick Collison

of the foundational “Progress Studies”

essay, in the Atlantic in 2019,runs thinktank

Mercatus — eectively Koch ideology with

footnotes.

Ireland has never lacked people eager to

explain its crises. The diculty is that too

many of those with the largest megaphones

— tech billionaires, large landowners,

deregulation think-tankers — Denis O’Brien

— describe problems that conveniently align

with their preferred solutions and the forces

that have delivered them their riches; and

which eschew tedious old-world constraints

like justice, equality and our ecology. (To be

fair to moneylord Dermot Desmond he aligns

a bit more with an anti-clientelist Statism)

If abundance were truly a doctrine of

material plenty, it would begin with the

abundance Ireland already possesses:

its environment; some native allure;

163,433 vacant residential units (CSO,

2022), including more than 14,000 vacant

properties in Dublin alone. Abundance

advocates airbrush dereliction entirely out

of the frame. Not because they fail to see it,

but because dereliction implicates their own

allies and funders.

Critics

Gratifyingly, once John Collison’s claims are

set beside the detailed critiques of coherent

academics who beat him to this space,

he begins to look slapdash, hurried and

intellectually challenged.

What you get from the likes of quiet

academic contributors on development and

planning in Ireland such as Andrew jackson,

Orla Hegarty and Lorcan Sirr, is a grounded,

data-driven account of a housing system

built on inﬂated land and “soft” costs,

speculative developer business models, a

captured policy process and a State that has

chosen to rely on high prices and developer

margins.

Jackson

Andrew Jackson (in “On Environmental

Democracy and the Collisons’ ‘Abundance-

Verse’”) , shows that the abundance

worldview seeks to dismiss ecological limits,

hollow out public participation and redeﬁne

legal safeguards as obstruction, fetishising

speed (or barriers to it) and demonising

expertise.

Jackson carefully documents the factual

errors embedded in Collison’s essay and

the broader abundance script. Ireland’s

environmental assessment regime derives

from long standing EU law, not Irish

eccentricity. Delays arise overwhelmingly

from poor-quality developer applications

and under-resourced authorities. Public

consultation is required by the Aarhus

Convention. Bodies like An Taisce and the

Heritage Council have only consultative

power, not the power to stop that Collison

imputes to them. Judicial review succeeds

because the State repeatedly makes legal

mistakes. Collison presents ecological limits

as optional: he needs to take a few minutes

with Science to acquaint himself with reality.

But he’s not that sort of bro.

Jackson could have gone further on

Collison’s recklessness with facts. Ireland,

John Collison says, has “41 per cent

fewer trains, roads and other transport

infrastructure per capita than high income

European countries”. 41% fewer trains

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and roads? The concept is illiterate. But

also untrue. An EU/ESA document says

that Ireland’s “length of local roads per

capita is by far the highest of the EU, while

for motorways it is around the EU average.

Collison’s makey-uppy facts perform

signiﬁcant rhetorical labour. They invite the

reader to believe the problem is simply that

Ireland has failed to build, and therefore

that deregulation is not merely desirable but

urgent.

SIPO and FOI have not “hamstrung”

politicians in any damaging way that might

concern those of us who value democracy

(and here he shows too much of his hand).

Dr Andrew Jackson’s legal analysis

converges with the persuasive work of Dr

Lorcan Sirr in the Irish Times. Fewer than

ﬁve per cent of permissions end up in

judicial review, and roughly forty per cent

of these cases are brought by developers

or landowners themselves. Judicial reviews

challenge procedure, not planning merit.

Weakening judicial review would legislate

silence on what remains the greatest issue

of our time.

Hegarty

The devastating evidence of Orla Hegarty

of UCD’s school of architecture to the Joint

Oireachtas Committee on Housing in 2022,

and her subsequent interventions mostly in

the Irish Times, cut the legs from under the

likes of intellectual dilletantes like Collison.

She demonstrates that construction cost is

not the source of Ireland’s aordability crisis.

Land, ﬁnance, marketing and developer

margins dominate in the aggregation of total

price. Rising benchmark apartment “costs”

stem not primarily from bricks and labour.

Hegarty shows, drawing on Department of

Housing ﬁgures, that the hard construction

cost of a typical three bed home remains in

the region of €180,000. A ten per cent rise in

materials adds roughly €10,000. This does

not explain Dublin sale prices that can be

double production cost.

What does explain them is a policy

environment that reset aordability

thresholds upwards, embedding

speculative pricing deep in the regulatory

and subsidy regime, and only ever delivering

assessments of real building costs from

vested interests. Delivery in Dublin is now

reliant on private investors seeking high

returns in risky markets. The result is a

permanent transfer from public to private

balance sheets, a kind of institutionalised

leakage built into the housing system, but

not into media coverage or the abundantist

lobbyists. A piece by Hegarty on RTE.ie in

September warned that the government’s

foolish plans to reduce minimum apartment

sizes to 32 sq m will mean “more units but

fewer people housed”. A building with

100 standard apartments might house

275 people, she noted, but if converted to

studios only 178. She argued small units

suit single occupants, undermining family

housing supply. She called claims of major

cost savings “overstated”, since kitchens,

bathrooms and services cost the same

regardless of size. Hegarty also highlighted

health and social harms of “living, cooking

and sleeping in one room”, warning

reforms prioritise short-term unit numbers

over’ liveability’, equity, and long-term

community needs — abundance as dearth.

Hegarty simply analyses non-ideologically

what the numbers show. She identiﬁes

a system that has been re engineered to

produce high prices, permanent subsidy and

predictable disappointment. It is not clear

where deﬁnitive criticism, like Hegarty’s ﬁts

in Collison’s worldview. His remoteness

suggests we will never ﬁnd out.

Sirr

In his April 2025 Irish Times column, TUD’s

Lorcan Sirr dismantled the deregulators on

the availability of sites. Ireland does not lack

land: councils have long had enough zoned

and serviced land for hundreds of thousands

of homes. In 2015, a Department of Housing

analysis showed that county councils had

enough zoned and serviced land for 414,000

houses. Since that research, about 195,000

houses have been built, and not all on that

land; some land has been dezoned, and

more land zoned…So, do we need more

zoned and serviced land, especially with

more than 70,000 houses and apartments

with planning permissions granted but never

built?”.

Planning and zoning have not created the

bottleneck: land hoarding, disguised by

developer led lobbying fuelling an inept

post-colonial discourse are.

Weakening judicial

review on planning and

the environment is to

legislate silence on what

remains the biggest

issues of our time

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Sirr also notes the anti-competitive

environment: “Our well-capitalised banks

are not lending, and HBFI [Home Building

Finance Ireland - a state agency that lends

to residential developers] interest rates are

in line with market lenders (ie expensive)

which is of limited use to SMEs. Instead,

it is reported that “large, well-connected

and inﬂuential ﬁrms dominate the list of

developers that have received loans from

the taxpayer-funded HBFI”.

And Sirr adds the blunt reality that Irish

Water estimates that existing networks can

support only 35,000 additional homes per

year — far below political targets, even if

we contrived to build more. The abundance

verse treats infrastructural constraint as

proof of overregulation rather than as

evidence of state neglect.

Collison’s “build more, faster” mantra

smashes directly into self-serving big-

developer culpability and state infrastructure

inertia not overreach.

And on the housing-aordability crisis

Sirr notes “supply plays only a minor role

in house-price reductions. Equal and more

important factors are demographics, wages

and especially interest rates”.

Media, ideology and the

politics of deference

Collison’s essay received front-page

treatment and breathless follow ups.

Jackson, Hegarty and Sirr whose analyses

are grounded in evidence get modest

platforms: Pat Leahy, proﬁled elsewhere in

this edition, ignores them.

More on Leahy’s wavelength is celebrity

Irish Times economist David McWilliams

who described judicial-review applicants as

an “entitled minority” giving “two ﬁngers to

the rest of us”. His deregulationism ﬁnds

typical expression in the headline over an

August 2025 article “Yimbyism: in North

America, families taking the housing crisis

into their own hands and building in their

gardens, so why not here?”.

Elsewhere in the Irish Times, which

represents so much of the problem and is

so blithely unconcerned how international

thinktanks can exploit it, that it’s worth

ﬂattering it with attention, Duty Editor John

McManus’s gentle criticism — that Collison

had “missed a fundamental truth” about

Irish politicians: their avoidance of taking

responsibility — was welcome but timid. It

challenged Collison’s naivety while leaving

his core assumptions intact. McManus

noted that Collison (and particularly his

brother) keep unsavoury political company

but somehow concludes his orientation

is left-of-centre, via Marc Dunkelman

(remember the name for dinner parties

and pub quizzes). He did not research

Collison’s root links. McMcmanus considers

Progress Ireland is “not exactly the Heritage

Foundation”. Koch strategy documents

explicitly prioritised media-friendly

intellectuals, lifestyle publications, and

“centrist” outlets to normalise deregulation

after grassroots libertarianism failed. Works

in Progress (which is Stripe-owned) mirrors

this approach: staed by former Adam Smith

Institute and Tufton Street ﬁgures, omitting

their libertarian pasts, and publishing

“neutral” long-form essays that shape elite

opinion without democratic contest.

Irish outlets are now playing the same

role US and UK media played during earlier

dissimulating rebrands.

Towards a better question

Back to Collison’s article, he asks, “Why

can’t Ireland just do things?”. It is the wrong

question. Ireland has been doing quite a lot

— just not things he cares to register. It has

quietly re-based aordability benchmarks

upward. It has designed subsidy schemes

that transfer billions to landlords and

developers. It has allowed vast tranches of

zoned, serviced land to sit unbuilt, derelict

or vacant, or be ﬂipped. It has centralised

and failed to enforce (unclear) planning

policy while starving local authorities. It

has tolerated a narrative that blames the

public for delays while developers hold o

developing until incentives for them go o

the scale: the Irish disease of public-sector

obeisance to the private sector at their

nexus.

The abundance agenda is designed

precisely to shift politics away from

distribution, ownership, land discipline

and democracy, and toward speed,

deregulation and executive discretion.

The more honest question is: who has the

power to shape these choices, and who

pays for them?

Hegarty and Sirr point to the same

answer. The winners are those who own

land, control ﬁnance and secure access to

subsidy. The losers are tenants, would be

owner-occupiers and the public ﬁnances.

A politics genuinely committed to

“getting Ireland moving” would not start

by weakening SIPO or demonising An

Taisce (declaration of interest: I was its

unpaid CEO 25 years ago). It would start by

publishing transparent, independent cost

data for land, construction and margins;

imposing strict use-it or lose-it conditions

on planning permissions; designing

procurement and ﬁnancing that favour

cost rental and non speculative schemes;

resourcing local planning properly ideally

with cross-sectoral roundtable input;

and treating public participation as a

democratic safeguard and opportunity.

Conclusion: abundance,

progress vision, democracy

and bros

Ireland does not lack abundance. It lacks

political courage. It lacks the willingness

to confront vested interests, to discipline

landowners, to invest directly, and to

govern for the people who live here rather

than those who speculate on it or who

techbro factlessly on it. (If techbros claim

solution, architect, sandbox etc as verbs,

Village will claim techbro as a verb.)

Ireland’s political class (not you of course)

continues to ﬂirt with facile technocratic

narratives precisely because they obscure

responsibility. The abundance/progress-

verse thrives in this haze: a politics of

permanent deferral, where everything is

blamed on caution and nothing on power

and money.

Ireland needs and deserves a future

that belongs to its people, not to the

counterfactual agendas of its wealthiest

and least-informed deregulatorists.

41% fewer

trains and

roads?

Collison’s

concept is

illiterate.

But also

untrue

Micheál Martin, from whom greater wisdom is expected,

told Collison and others: “What is killing us is delivery,

planning and judicial review”.

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