Cloud's got housing stalled for backups

THERE are a lot of big numbers behind the ongoing social calamity that is Ireland's housing crisis.

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There are the 15,378 people officially listed as homeless for starters.

The average monthly rent that just broke the €2,000 barrier this week.

The 50,000 houses needed every year.

The 30,330 that got built in 2024.

The 1.18million middle-aged and older people who the Government reckons could downsize to let younger families have their homes.

But there is a number that has become part of the problem that never gets talked about. It dwarfs all those other figures even the €430,000 mooted salary for a housing czar to undo all the blockages in the system.

Think of the largest number you can, then double it, and I bet you won't come close to the notion of a 'zettabyte'.

A zettabyte is one sextillion bytes of data.

Or maybe you prefer to understand it as 10 to the power of 21 bytes. Or one trillion gigabytes if that helps.

The point is, it's big.

UNITS

Now imagine 100 of them back-to-back and you will have the number of units of stuff that the world stores in 'The Cloud'.