Brian O’Flynn

I wrote an article about how new builds may contribute to rent price inflation
for the Irish Independent.

After a report showed that rent price inflation in Ireland remained very high despite rent caps being in place, I drew on my thesis research to explain why rent caps may not be effective until we also control new rents.

I wrote my MSc thesis on the impact of institutional investment in Dublin housing
at University College Dublin.

My thesis used R to analyse data on company investment in housing units across areas of Dublin. I combined corporate and public datasets to see if there were trends or correlations between investment in an area and rent prices in that area.

I wrote a brief on the causes of rising rent across Europe 
for Oxford Analytica.

Oxford Analytica asked me to write for their Daily Brief about the root causes and sociopolitical consequences of rising rental prices across Europe. I drew from my thesis research to explain how financialization, the privatisation of social housing, and a low interest rate environment have all contributed to spiralling rental price inflation across major European cities.

I wrote a research paper exploring visual bias in images of politicians scraped from Irish media Twitter accounts
at University College Dublin.

I also wrote a research paper which combined computer vision and text analysis techniques to examine patterns in the positivity or negativity of images of politicians used by Irish media. This images-as-data approach is really exciting and I hope to do more research on this in the future.