How has Ireland’s approach to housing changed over the last 10 years?
Years of underinvestment in housing has lead to a crunch point where demand has outstripped supply. File picture
The term housing crisis first entered the Irish lexicon in the 2010s when spiralling home prices, rising rent, increasing homelessness, and falling house delivery became a pattern across the country.
In late 2012, Trinity economist Ronan Lyons wrote that as Ireland was emerging from the property crash, the Government needed to begin to plan to build the houses that cities would need over the decade ahead.
“This may sound odd, as property oversupply still blights much of the country, but the mistakes of the past should mean avoiding making more mistakes in the future,” Mr Lyons wrote.
This was an early indication of what was to come, with years of underinvestment in housing leading to a crunch point where demand simply outstripped supply.
Over the last decade, each new housing minister has taken a different approach to dealing with the crisis. We have a new minister now, James Browne, who is now responsible for the toughest job in Irish politics: solve the housing crisis.
How exactly has Ireland’s approach to housing changed over the last 10 years, and where does it go next?
During his tenure as environment minister, Labour’s Alan Kelly hosted an emergency housing and homelessness summit in his final months in Cabinet.
The hastily cobbled together summit saw Mr Kelly speak about how the Constitution had created “blockages” for his efforts to resolve the housing crisis.
He cited the impact of Article 43, which provides property rights to citizens, as an issue preventing greater protections for renters.
In the months after the summit, a new government was formed and a minister for housing was formally appointed – a role which had not existed before in Ireland.
This new minister, Cork South Central’s Simon Coveney, was tasked with delivering a plan to deal with the housing and homelessness within the first 100 days of government.
This plan, known as Rebuilding Ireland, was launched in July 2016 and contained new policies and pledges that were aimed at building major housing developments and reducing the number of people in homelessness.
Government ministers throughout the years have made a myriad of pledges as to when homelessness in Ireland would end.
The death of Jonathan Corrie, a homeless man who passed away just metres from Leinster House in 2014, brought homelessness to the fore in Irish politics.
Mr Kelly had promised to end homelessness by 2016, while Mr Coveney pledged to end the use of hotels and B&Bs for homeless accommodation by mid-2017.
Neither of these promises were delivered.
The number of people in emergency accommodation has grown with each passing year.
Eoghan Murphy, the housing minister between 2017 and 2020, never set a concrete target, instead saying that the problem of homelessness could never be eliminated in totality.
But in the last government's plan — Darragh O’Brien’s housing plan — the Government committed to ending homelessness by 2030, as set out by the Lisbon Declaration.
Since then, homelessness has reached its highest ever levels in Ireland, with 15,286 people accessing emergency accommodation in January 2025.
The new housing minister James Browne has since retreated from this 2030 target, saying that “projections and dates aren’t going to deliver a single apartment”.
The cost to the State of providing emergency accommodation has been significant in recent years, with a report from Focus Ireland in June 2024 detailing the sharp rises over the last decade.
According to the report, the average annual spend on homelessness services between 2009 and 2014 was €73.5m.
But from 2015 onwards, this expenditure began to rapidly increase.
Between 2015 and 2019, the expenditure had more than doubled from just under €100m to over €220m.
In 2023, the financial reports for all nine local authority areas set out that there was €340.83m spent on homelessness services. This includes the cost of providing emergency accommodation, as well as homelessness prevention services and day services.
The overall spend on homelessness services over the last decade has been €2.2bn, which follows the significant rise in people ending up in emergency accommodation.
For example, at the end of 2014 there were 3,738 people in homelessness. By the end of 2024, this figure has skyrocketed to 14,864. This is nearly a tripling of homelessness over the course of a decade.
Simon Communities of Ireland have insisted it is possible to reduce homelessness across the country, pointing out that the Government managed to do so during the covid-19 pandemic.
Wayne Stanley, their executive director, said the reduction in homelessness happened by preventing families and individuals from entering into homelessness in the first place while ensuring there was increased housing supply to move people out of emergency accommodation.
It seems increasingly unlikely that Ireland will end homelessness by 2030. The figures continue to rise.
One of the biggest schemes introduced to help accelerate the building of new houses, as part of , was the Help-to-Buy scheme, announced as part of Budget 2017 to assist first-time buyers get on the property ladder.
It was established so that home-buyers would receive up to €20,000 back on a new-build house, in the form of an income tax rebate.
Then-finance minister Michael Noonan said he was introducing the scheme as part of efforts to address the “acute shortage of new houses being built in Ireland”.
He argued that supply increases to meet demand, and that a Help-to-Buy scheme would increase the demand for new-build homes by aiding first-time buyers to get on the property ladder.
“I expect the building industry to meet this additional demand by increasing the supply of new affordable homes,” Mr Noonan told the Dáil.
While the number of houses built after the scheme was introduced did increase, the level of delivery failed to meet the average of 25,000 new houses per year targeted in .
The Government has repeatedly been warned about the scheme, by bodies such as the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), which have described it as inflationary and said it adds to the price of new-build housing.
The Oireachtas Parliamentary Budget Office cites two separate reports, from Indecon and the annual Tax Strategy Papers, that there has been “a very small increase in prices” attributable to the Help-to-Buy scheme.
The same criticism has been levelled at the Government by opposition parties, with Sinn Féin repeatedly saying that the scheme pushes up house prices.
Such criticism became a theme during the general election, with Sinn Féin pledging to phase out the programme over a number of years, while both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil pressed for expansions to the Help-to-Buy scheme.
Several housing and economic experts have argued that developers can just hike the cost of a house by the amount given back through Help-to-Buy.
Initially, the scheme had been expected to expire in 2019, but the 2020 coalition opted to retain it and increase the tax rebate from €20,000 to €30,000. It is now not set to expire until December 31, 2029.
A report from the Central Bank, published last September, outlined that the scheme was mostly helping higher earners.
It signalled that young prospective homebuyers, with good salaries, were struggling to save enough to buy a house, amid significant price inflation for properties across the country.
According to Revenue, as of November 2024, there have been 51,965 Help-to-Buy approvals, with the total value of claims reaching €1.13bn.
A second scheme to assist first-time buyers was introduced by Darragh O’Brien under , known as the First Home shared equity scheme.
This scheme allows individuals or couples to receive up to €20,000 back on a new-build house, in the form of an income tax rebate.
It was designed to “bridge the gap” for people, where they have saved up a deposit for a house but there is a shortfall for what their overall mortgage would cover. Initially only for new-builds, the 2025 programme for government commits to expanding it to second-hand homes.
As of January, there have been over 6,000 approvals to the scheme, of which half have drawn down funding and purchased a property.
Similar to the Help-to-Buy scheme, some criticism has been levelled at the First Home scheme, with concerns that it drives up house prices.
One report from consultants KPMG has suggested that there is no evidence that the scheme is inflating house prices at present. However, it did call on the Government to watch closely the scheme, in case that changes.
The biggest reforms to Ireland’s rental sector in years had been the introduction of Rent Pressure Zones.
The zones were introduced after recommended a separate review of the rental market, which later called for the introduction of limited rent controls in specific areas.
This change, which was initially billed as a short-term measure, restricted landlords in how much they could increase the rent by for sitting tenants, provided the property was located in a designated area.
Initially, the increases were limited to a maximum of 4% per year, but amid the covid-19 pandemic this was changed. Rent increases were limited to a maximum 2% per year, or the rate of general inflation, whichever was lower.
Throughout the lifetime of rent pressure zones, concerns have been expressed that landlords may not be complying with the cap on rent increases.
Research from the Residential Tenancies Board last year found that existing tenants in rent pressure zones had seen rent hiked by as much as 5.2%, way beyond the 2% limit. In mid-2016, the average rent in Cork City was €1,051 per month. In mid-2024, it had almost doubled to €2,005 per month.
Other measures pursued by the Irish Government has been a new model of ‘cost-rental’ housing.
This new form of housing for Ireland is inspired by the so-called “Vienna model”, with the Austrian capital having developed a sustainable rental market at an affordable level for renters over decades.
In Ireland, it is slightly different, with cost-rental properties aiming to provide accommodation to tenants at 25% of the existing market rate for rent.
It is somewhat targeted in Ireland, aimed at those who are above the threshold to qualify for social housing but still struggle to pay high rents in cities across the country.
Under the plan, the aim was to deliver 2,000 units of cost-rental each year up to 2030. As of July 2024, there have been 2,180 cost-rental homes delivered, which comes through a variety of different sources, including approved housing bodies and local authorities.
The Government has attempted to kickstart cost-rental development through schemes like the Secure Tenancy Affordable Rental investment scheme, or STAR.
This can give private developers, or affordable housing bodies, private equity investment, in return for any houses delivered being made cost-rental for at least 50 years.
Other schemes have been introduced, like the Cost Rental Equity Loan (CREL), which provides loan finance to approved housing bodies to build cost-rental properties.
New tax reliefs were also introduced during the 2020-2025 coalition, including the rent tax credit for tenants and a landlords tax relief, where they can claim back tax on their rental income profits.
One major reform introduced by the 2016-2020 government was a system of Strategic Housing Developments, or SHDs.
This was a change to planning rules, where large developments could leapfrog the local authority planning system and go straight to An Bord Pleanála.
While they were designed to fast-track housing schemes, SHDs were frequently challenged in the courts, and in some cases, development never started when they received planning approval.
While some did get over the line, it is clear that the SHD process failed to expedite planning applications for large developments, and in many cases slowed them down through litigation.
The system was entirely scrapped in 2023.
One aspect of Eoghan Murphy’s housing policy that remains in place today is the Land Development Agency (LDA), which he formally established in 2018.
The agency was set up by the Government to manage lands owned by the State, with a particular focus on developing them for housing, in joint ventures with private builders.
While the Government initially promised housing delivery from the agency in 2020, the first phase of houses came in 2024, when Shanganagh Castle Estate in Shankill, Co Dublin was launched.
However, despite houses now being developed, criticism has been launched about the cost of affordable homes at Shanganagh, which had ranged between €334,600 and €430,200 for a two-bed house.
The agency is only now getting to its feet after seven years in operation, with multiple projects in train.
Another scheme introduced by the Government as part of was the Croí Cónaithe (Cities) scheme, which is a fund to help activate apartment development in urban areas across the country.
It is particularly focused on apartments for owner-occupiers rather than direct build-to-rent apartments.
It was set up to bridge the “viability gap”, where the cost of building the apartments would be more than what they would sell for.
In June 2024, it was confirmed that €50m worth of subsidies under the scheme would be provided for the development of 372 apartments in Cork.
Concerns have been raised about the scheme, particularly over the high level of State investment.
Figures from last June reveal that subsidies were estimated to be €135,000 per unit, beyond the €80,000 per unit expected in 2022.
It comes as new figures from the Central Statistics Office outline a 39% fall in planning permissions granted for apartments last year.
In recent months, the Taoiseach has signalled a need to bring in more private sector investment into apartment building, including through the use of tax reliefs for developers.
One of the most controversial aspects of Eoghan Murphy’s time as housing minister was his backing of co-living developments, which were derided as “21st century bedsits”.
Studio bedrooms would be built in blocks, with occupants able to access communal kitchens and other living spaces.
Mr Murphy said that he backed the schemes to give more housing options to people, but it was totally rejected by opposition parties.
Co-living was later banned, with the 2020 Government refusing to allow any new developments to be submitted for planning.
During his time as housing minister, Simon Coveney brought forward a proposal to create a Housing Delivery Office as part of his plan.
The office itself was billed as an organisation that would help accelerate housing delivery, both private and public, particularly working to resolve barriers for large schemes.
After four years, it was reformatted and moved into the Local Government Management Agency, with a new focus on delivery of social and affordable housing.
The Government is now looking to establish a Strategic Housing Delivery Office within the Department of Housing, almost a decade on from the establishment of the Housing Delivery Office.
The programme for government outlines that this will help accelerate housebuilding by “unblocking infrastructure delays”, which has a similar mandate to the initial plan for the Housing Delivery Office.
With both and now in the rear view mirror, the current coalition and new minister, James Browne, will be tasked at coming up with a revised housing plan.
Government sources have previously indicated that this could be done as early as this summer.
In particular, it will propose the delivery of 15,000 starter homes each year, saying that this will be driven by both Help-to-Buy and the First Home Scheme.
Mr Browne will also need to contend with the new housing targets, set just weeks before the general election, which look difficult to meet amid sluggish delivery in recent months.
With the new Government only taking up office in January, they have almost five full years to pull Ireland out of its housing crisis.
The thousands of people in homelessness, on housing waiting lists, stuck in their parent’s box room, or in high-priced rental accommodation, will be hoping they can.
