This article is part of Ireland’s Changing Suburbs, an Irish Times series exploring our fast-growing new towns, changing older neighbourhoods, and shrinking rural landscapes. As part of the series, Fintan O’Toole writes about ‘the commodification of Crumlin’

“It’s like having roommates rather than children. It’s kind of unnatural in a way, and my heart breaks for them. I shouldn’t know everything about their life. They should have their own independence.”

Angela Kettle has lived in Dundrum most of her life, but she knows the generation coming after her will not be able to say the same thing. She and her husband built their home in the back garden of his parents’ house in the late 1990s, and now all three of her adult children are still living at home.

One son is doing a masters to become a teacher, another son is doing an electrical apprenticeship and her daughter has just started an Arts degree at UCD.

Kettle does not see a way out for any of them without leaving the country.

“They’ll never be able to buy, not just in Dundrum but anywhere in Dublin at all,” she says.

The Dublin suburb she grew up in has changed irrevocably since she was a child.

Animated video map of Dundrum. Video: Google Maps/Paul Scott

What was once a thriving village, with shopfronts hosting the same name for generations and a growing community thanks to the large-scale local housing expansion of the 1960s and 1970s, has since become somewhat empty and stuck in time.

The biggest eyesore on main