Housing emergency? Ireland is not even acting at the level of mildly urgent

Irish Times

2 days ago

Housing
, the Taoiseach and Tánaiste pronounce regularly, is the
Government's
'number one priority'.
Then what does it say about the Coalition when things are so demonstrably getting worse?
There is a growing tendency around
Government Buildings
and Leinster House to mutter about the performance of new housing minister
James Browne
, and not just among Fine Gaelers. Not up to the job, they sniff. A bit at sea. Overwhelmed.
Maybe they're right – probably too soon to make a fair judgment – but this isn't Browne's failure. It's a whole of Government failure and it's being going on for a long time.
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Are there viable pleas in mitigation? Sure. The bust wiped out the construction industry (though that was a decade and a half ago). Covid froze things for a year and a half. The planning laws and processes seem designed to prevent the provision of housing. Inflation has driven up costs, rogering the developers' sums. Banks are too slow to lend. The courts seem eager to quash planning permissions, often for flimsy reasons.
But does all that excuse the Government's performance? Not at this stage. We are heading for a decade of failure to get to grips with a growing social disaster. That's long enough to fix things, even in Ireland. This is a Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil failure and they are running out of time to fix it.
The evidence that things are going in the wrong direction is mounting lately. Last week,
Daft.ie
reported that the cost of renting increased by an average of 3.4 per cent in the first three months of 2025, with the
increases taking the monthly average open-market rent to over €2,000
for the first time.
Meanwhile, despite the skyrocketing rents, home ownership is in freefall among the young. This is deeply socially destabilising. A friend reports from a terrace of two-up-two-downers in Ringsend that there is a queue down the street of prospective renters for a nearby house. The rent? Nearly three grand a month.
The figures for the delivery of new housing, meanwhile, are also going in the wrong direction. On Tuesday, the ESRI told an Oireachtas committee that there will be no big increase in housing supply this year or next year. The numbers might get to 34,000 this year and 37,000 in 2026, but 'most of the risks weigh on the downside'.
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ESRI to warn Government of no major uptick in housing supply this year or next
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And even if those numbers are achieved, that would require 78,000 houses to be completed for each of the following three years to meet the Government's promises of 300,000 units during its term. What, do we think, are the chances of that happening?
Meanwhile, water utility Uisce Éireann has said that
it may be unable to grant any new connections in the Dublin area by 2028
. And the secretary general of the
Department of Climate and Energy
told the Oireachtas committee that the squeeze on energy connections was such that they might have to choose between housing and artificial intelligence (AI). Data centres are scheduled to guzzle 30 per cent of our electricity by 2030.
In recent days I've spoken to two housing developers, each responsible for thousands of units and desperate to build more. Both are pretty much tearing their hair out at the planning, bureaucratic and legal barriers put in their way.
One says he cannot plan anything because of the lack of certainty over what's happening with
rent pressure zones
and possible tax changes. Both measures were flagged as possibilities five months ago; there is still no sign of a decision.
'We can't take a view on whether projects are viable because we have no certainty on anything,' he says. Even on existing projects, the processes are ridiculously time-consuming. He has been waiting seven months for clarity on one design feature. The entire industry is 'sitting on its hands', he says.
The other developer spent three years preparing an application for permission for 500 units. The planning inspector recommended the go ahead. But
An Bord Pleanála
nixed it. The board could have put conditions on it and construction would be under way by now, but instead it refused outright. So, back to the drawing board. 'This is not a system that promotes supply,' the developer says. 'It is a system that retards supply.'
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Ireland's housing perma-crisis returns to centre of political agenda
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Everyone talks about an emergency, but the reality is that at no level is the system set up to deliver housing at scale and quickly. In fact, the very opposite seems to be the case. There is simply no way that the current system of housing provision – from finance to planning to utility provision to actual construction – can solve the housing crisis.
There is a very quiet school of thought in parts of the Government that says the political fallout from all this is actually already baked in – that the people who are most concerned about housing don't vote for the Government parties anyway.
I don't think that's right. I think there are a lot of people that gave Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael the benefit of the doubt on housing at the last election, but will turn against them if the crisis is not substantially eased by the next election. But even if I'm wrong about that, there is surely an overwhelming moral responsibility on the Government to fix housing. The only way to do this is to begin actually acting like it is an emergency. Special planning powers, tax incentives, rapid approval for expenditure – whatever it takes.
Emergency? Come off it. We're not at the level of mildly urgent.