While the Government appears to have been quite happy with itself following the recent news that housing completions rose by 20.4 per cent last year to 36,284 units, the numbers are still a long way off the 50,000 to 60,000 units it will need to deliver in each of the next five years to hit its target of 300,000 new homes by the end of 2030.
Even as he described the uptick in housing output in 2025 as “very significant”, Taoiseach Micheál Martin conceded “it’s not enough” while noting how he and his colleagues had been “learning over the last years that this is a hard slog in many respects”.
Martin’s qualified admission of failure is to be welcomed if it signals a genuine increase in the urgency with which Fianna Fáil and its Coalition partner, Fine Gael, intend to tackle the housing crisis that they have presided over together for at least a decade.
Less welcome for some, however, were the signals sent by the then minister for finance Paschal Donohoe in last October’s budget in relation to the type of housing the Government is looking to encourage as it seeks to accelerate supply to achieve its lofty goal.
In the first instance, Donohoe’s refusal to accede to the demands of estate agents and others within the property industry to increase the threshold for the Help-to-Buy scheme from the €500,000 cap, which has been in place since its inception in 2017, sent a clear message to those involved in the delivery of new homes both in Dublin and its immediate commuter belt. Put simply, the Government wants to see zoned land in these locations used for the development of more affordable, higher-density apartment schemes as opposed to the houses that Irish people have traditionally aspired to buy and live in.
That singular focus on apartment delivery was made even clearer with the announcement in the budget of a reduction in the VAT rate on apartments from 13.5 per cent to 9 per cent, and the introduction of an enhanced corporation tax deduction for certain costs on their construction.
While the impact of Donohoe’s budgetary measures has yet to be reflected in housing completions, figures released earlier this week suggest that, in Dublin at least, apartments are set to account for the lion’s share of new homes across the capital over the next number of years. The report on the pipeline of housing activity showed that of the 27,288 homes with planning permission in the Dublin City Council area in the third quarter of 2025, 26,813 or 98.3 per cent were apartments. In Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, 15,609 or 88 per cent of the 17,736 new homes with planning permission were apartments. In Fingal, planning permission was in place for 21,022 homes (13,539 or 64.4 per cent of which are apartments), while in the South Dublin County Council area planning permission was in place for 14,534 new homes (9,887 or 68 per cent of which are apartments).
Looking at those apartment numbers and the Government’s obvious determination to increase them further, it’s clear the Irish people’s longstanding relationship with the three-bed semi-Ds and the various other rungs of the so-called property ladder is going to change, in Dublin to begin with, and then elsewhere.
There are early signs of that change reflected in the houses and apartments available for sale in Dublin, the commuter counties and beyond. A selection of these developments is included in this week’s Irish Times coverage of new homes.