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Barszczak, Rafal Sławomir (2025) Precarity, Aspiration, Cultural and Ideological Capture: A Phenomenological Study of Generation Rent in Ireland’s Financialised Housing System. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.
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Abstract
The increasingly growing Generation Rent (GR) in Ireland lives in a suspended state, unable to attain homeownership, condemned to rent in a financialised market that offers neither security nor affordability. The ideological foundations of commodification were seeded by neoliberal policies that emerged globally in the 1970s and have since flourished into a financialised housing system — a full bloom of a fairy tree, with fruit for many but increasingly thorns for the rest. Those who find themselves on the sharp end experience housing precarity, causing a plethora of negative psychological and material effects. The roots of the current housing crisis are in the entrenched cultural norms. The tree is haunted by the Irish “ancestral ghost of land and real estate,” preventing society from imagining alternative forms of secure tenure. Political narratives and efforts to alleviate the problem are dissonant with renters' lived experiences, yet hypernormalised to protect the ontological security of the tree’s inhabitants. Fret not, fairies, no lumberjack is coming to cut blackthorn, but a dialectical tree surgeon.
Through a qualitative thematic and phenomenological analysis of 10 in-depth interviews with Irish-born and non-Irish-born renters, the dissertation interrogates how financialisation has shaped housing aspirations of GR, and how housing precarity effects are dealt with. It investigates how cultural narratives feed into housing aspirations and perceptions of renting among the two groups. It examines evidence of and explores the mechanisms behind the Hypernormalisation of the current housing policy direction. The findings indicate that financialisation has led to an inefficient housing market, causing GR to experience precarity. The perception of renting is negative, with ownership seen as the only means of achieving safe tenure. Renters manage the precarity but struggle to envision alternatives due to cultural entrenchment and imposition. Policy narratives are dissonant with lived experiences and indicate Hypernormalisation.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
|---|---|
| Supervisors: | Name Email MacDonald, Robert UNSPECIFIED |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography > Human settlements > Housing D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain > Ireland |
| Divisions: | School of Business (- 2025) > Master of Business Administration |
| Depositing User: | Tamara Malone |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Jan 2026 11:35 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Jan 2026 11:35 |
| URI: | https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/9069 |
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