State paid over €200m towards homes bought by cuckoo funds

Sinn Féin TD Eoin Ó Broin condemned the use of public money earmarked for affordable houses to prop up giant institutional funds as ‘an absolute scandal’

Carton Grove, the Maynooth housing estate, is one of the developments which has prompted an outpouring of criticism towards the state’s housing policy. Picture: Barry Cronin

The Irish state has helped finance the construction of more than 900 homes over the last year which had already been purchased in advance by so-called cuckoo funds.

New information released by Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI), a state agency, shows it provided hundreds of millions of euro in funding to developers building large-scale residential projects that have already been reserved by institutional funds.

HBFI did not disclose the exact amount of funding given to ...