Housing policy is best made with a long-term perspective. It takes decades to address the enormous shortfalls that have emerged in Ireland, but the Government response has consisted mainly of demand-side subsidies, both grants to purchasers like the Help to Buy scheme and tax breaks for buyers, renters and developers. The aggregate Exchequer cost of these short-term measures has been estimated at €12bn with little benefit for a younger generation priced out of home ownership, facing unaffordable rents or living with parents longer than they would wish.

Demand-side measures in the face of a persistent shortfall in supply are designed to create the impression that the Government is pro-active. The evidence is that it has not cared enough to address the supply side constraints directly and most of the measures taken look more like sound-bite populism, enabled by the recent strong performance of the economy and the fortuitous inflow of corporation tax revenue. The budget may even remain in surplus for another couple of years, despite the failure to control spending and the constant willingness to announce new tax give-aways.

What happens then? On past experience, the first response to budget pressures will be a go-slow on State capital spending, but the current Government has committed to an ever larger capital programme, including the Dublin MetroLink, on which several billion has been spent incurred, but for which no credible cost estimate is available.

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Every release of housing data reveals another undershoot, with likely completions this year no more than 35,000 or 40,000 nationally, versus estimates that sustained output over at least a decade will need to hit 60,000 or more just to keep pace with rising demand.

Aside from the inadequacy of overall targets, there is apparent indifference to the geographical distribution of new housing output. Ireland is not short of land – it is a low-density country by European standards, but the gate-keeper role for land-use changes has been delegated to local authorities since the 1963 Planning and Development Act.

Especially in Dublin and the main provincial cities, the local authorities are pressured by residents’ associations to zone too little land for development and the locally-elected members have every incentive to succumb to the pressure. In some local authorities there are even intentions to de-zone land in the next planning cycle.

National policy consists of targets which are never achieved along with resistance to zoning reform. It is easiest to acquire land for residential development in parts of the country where houses and rents are least expensive. There is also a repeated commitment in official documents and ministerial speeches to something called ‘balanced regional development’, interpreted as an acknowledgment that extra zoning in urban areas, notably Dublin, is not a priority and that Dublin’s population is already big enough.

The share of Dublin in national population, recently around 28 or 29%, is cited as excessive without evidential support. Small countries with just one large city often have higher percentages – tiny Singapore is close to 100%, but France and England, with populations around 60m, have capital cities with well under 15 or 16% of the total. For Ireland to have just one large city with 28 or 29% of national population is not unusual.

It is simply not true that population growth in Dublin city and county has been notably faster than in the rest of the country. Since the 1971 census, after a long period of little change, national population had risen 85.5% to the second quarter of 2026 and Dublin by just 87.5%.

The population of Meath more than trebled and Kildare’s numbers growth was even faster. The pattern is one of urban sprawl rather than of urban concentration, and there are older suburbs of Dublin where population has been static.

It is often in these areas that the resistance of residents to new developments, even on expanses of under-utilised land, is most vociferous. Government has declined to set minimum zoning targets for the city and it could accommodate more residents – the alternative, their displacement around Leinster, has been a disaster in regional planning and the construction of a single, short, underground railway at enormous cost on the Swords and airport alignment does not address the issue.

There is an alternative and it has been put into effect in Auckland, the capital of New Zealand, a city of Dublin’s size. While Dublin split its single local authority into four in the 1990s, Auckland abolished eight authorities in 2010, merged them into one and pursued a policy of infill and higher densities. Housing costs have fallen and have become affordable for younger buyers and renters.

A trip to the Antipodes during the coming winter will attract many northern Europeans. The Government’s latest task force on housing affordability should join them.