The ‘gentrification’ of Dublin: ‘Young people are coming in, buying houses and gutting them’

The arrival of a new cohort of homeowners is obvious from the facades of the homes on the Bulfin Estate in Inchicore, Dublin 8.

Built by Dublin Corporation in the 1920s, the estate is populated by three-bed semidetached and terraced houses, some of which retain their original pebble-dash exteriors with wood-effect or white PVC window frames, while others have been recently upgraded; they are freshly plastered with millennial-grey window frames, trendy chrome house numbers and mounted electric vehicle chargers. There is an unmistakable sense of transience here, with for-sale and sale-agreed signs dotted around the estate.

This mix of the old and the new on the Bulfin Estate is an example of Dublin gentrification in action, a term used to describe the movement of the middle classes into an area that was formerly working class, originally coined by sociologist Ruth Glass when describing London in the 1960s.

“It was probably five or six years ago when house prices started to really go out of the water, but definitely in the last two years it has gone [mad]. Now, nobody knows their neighbours because it’s youngish people coming in and they keep very much to themselves,” says Mary Fagan, a resident of the estate since 1988.

“Now, so do I, you know, so I can’t really say a word about that,” she adds, with a laugh.

Fagan marvels that her new neighbours’ houses had asking prices of around €360,000 but ended up selling for half a million. She stresses that they are “probably lovely people” who are likely to bestruggling financially.

A three-bedroom semidetached home of 73 sq m in modern, move-in condition on the estate, for example, is currently on the market with a €395,000 asking price. Bidding for the house at the time of writing is up to €433,000, according to selling agent David Brock of Brock DeLappe. Similar houses would have had an asking price of about €325,000 before Covid, he says.

Mannix Flynn, an independent councillor for Dublin’s southeast inner city, claims so-called gen