Mary Lou McDonald: Average house prices in Dublin should fall to ‘the €300,000 mark’

House prices have to fall substantially, the Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has said, adding that the objective of Sinn Féin in government would be to “get prices as low as we feasibly can”.

In an interview with The Irish Times, Ms McDonald dismissed suggestions that seeking a slump in home values was politically dangerous, saying, “the far greater political danger is that we have still an entire generation for whom home ownership is a dim and distant fantasy”.

She said that average house prices in Dublin should fall to “the €300,000 mark”. Figures from the Central Statistics Office suggest that the average house price in Dublin is about €430,000 at present.

Podcast: Mary Lou McDonald on house prices, migration policy, defamation cases and more

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Ms McDonald also said that Sinn Féin would not change Ireland’s economic model and enterprise policy if it were elected to government.

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“I don’t want people fretting or sweating things that are not about the kind of change that we’re talking about,” she said. “We want an economy that is robust, that is diverse, that generates prosperity, and then we want to share it in a fair and equal fashion.”

She said that on economic policy, Sinn Féin in government would not be “pulling rabbits from hats”.

[ How Sinn Féin is pivoting as it anticipates power in the Republic ]

Ms McDonald dismissed suggestions by a series of NGOs and international freedom of expression advocates that a spate of legal actions by Sinn Féin TDs for defamation was producing a chilling effect on media organisations, which undermines democracy. She said that she had no problem with criticism but that when it crossed a line into defamation, that was “against the law”.

“You should know the difference between fair and critical robust comment and defamation . . . Defamation is against the law, and journalists have to accept that, I’m afraid, like the rest of us,” she said.

Ms McDonald confirmed that her own legal action for damages for defamation against RTÉ was proceeding, as was her husband’s case for damages against Shane Ross, the journalist and former government minster who wrote a biography of the Sinn Féin leader.

[ Mary Lou McDonald takes High Court case against RTÉ over alleged defamation ]

Ms McDonald also said that the Government was not applying the “rule book” efficiently enough on asylum, adding that there was a “moral obligation” to offer asylum to people who qualified, but that people who did not would have to “leave the jurisdiction”.

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