From The Rings of Power to House of the Dragon, fantasy television is all the rage. So it’s the perfect moment for RTÉ to bring back Cheap Irish Homes (RTÉ One, Thursday, 7pm), a show for those who yearn for make-believe kingdoms where fantastical dreams come true. It even has a noble adventurer, in its presenter, Maggie Molloy, setting out on the daunting quest of identifying affordable housing.
Molloy’s mission has increased in difficulty since the first series of Cheap Irish Homes aired, in late 2021. In the year since then the housing crisis has grown even more acute. But in an upbeat returning episode, the likable host does her best to lift the spirits of all would-be homeowners who have, understandably, abandoned all hope.
The idea the series wants to convey is that, if you look hard enough, there is a property for you. The caveat is that this home is unlikely to be bang in the middle of Dublin, Cork or Galway. And it may well be a fixer-upper. Or an over-the-shop affair, as is one of the properties Molloy shows Laura Young, a civil servant and influencer, as they search the Carlow-Wexford region.
It’s possible to imagine a version of Cheap Irish Homes that is one long march to Mount Doom and Gloom, but Young and her engineer sidekick, Kieran McCarthy, keep the tone upbeat, with the message that there’s still great value if you look in the right places.
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Young is positive about leaving Dublin. “The benefits of living in the country outweigh the city,” she says. “I want a clothesline in the garden.”
The apartment above the shop doesn’t meet her requirements (too big and too dark). She is, however, taken with a bungalow in the village of Blackwater with a non-eye-watering price tag of €195,000. (And it is charming – or will be when all the dead flies are removed from the window sills.)
Young has a decent budget; a cynical read would be that the show is gaslighting its audience by insisting there is cheap property, if only you search far and wide (and presuming you have a mortgage sorted). But that isn’t at all how it comes across. The tone is effusive. And in dark times – for the housing market and everything else, for that matter – such bubbliness is not to be sniffed at. If there is such a thing as feelgood property television in Ireland in 2022, this is it.
