Ireland’s housing crisis deepened in 2024 with fewer homes built, hindered by planning, infrastructure, and zoning issues despite builders’ readiness to deliver. CONOR O’CONNELL, Director, Housing & Planning, Construction Industry Federation, outlines issues that need to be addressed to remove obstacles to housing delivery.
The issue of housing supply was recently brought into sharp focus as we constructed less homes in 2024 than 2023. Questions were asked about how could the projections be so wrong and who was at fault. As usual, housing supply became a political football with lots of commentary and finger-waving. The housing crisis is the central issue of our time. While debates and commentary persist, there are thousands of people waiting to buy homes or access social housing. Despite this urgent need for housing, an increasing number of roadblocks, such as planning delays, water and electricity shortages, and land zoning challenges, have created a homebuilding crisis within the broader housing crisis at a time when new homes are needed more than ever. Building more homes depends on four key issues
– Zoned residential land
– Services and infrastructure availability, such as water and electricity connections
– Planning permission, and
– Financial viability and funding.
All of these are essential components of homebuilding, yet they are heavily constrained.
Zoning for housing
You cannot just build anywhere. Not only do you have to seek planning permission, but the place or location you wish to build in has to be zoned for that purpose in a county development plan by your local authority. The local authority specifies how much land is to be zoned for residential development based on population projections decided at a national level.
The last time our population growth was estimated in detail for assessing the amount of land that could be zoned for housing was in the 2018 National Planning Framework. This was based on population growth estimates from the 2016 census.
Since 2016, our population has grown far in excess of the estimate from this time. As you can imagine, this has constrained the supply of zoned land, prices have risen, and availability has become scarce. What’s more, land designated for housing can lose its zoning status once the local area plan expires.
The solution? Local authorities must be instructed by the government to zone more land for housing and to keep the current zoning active by not allowing zoned land to become dezoned as a result of local plans expiring.
Infrastructure
Land availability cannot be addressed in isolation; it must be considered alongside the availability and supply of water and wastewater infrastructure, road and public transport access, electricity supply and, of course, supporting community infrastructure.
Investing in infrastructure is not a cost but a public investment in our future. We not only need zoned land in the right locations, but also ‘pipes in the ground’ to supply water to new homes.
Similar, to the supply of zoned land, the government has been consistently underestimating the amount of infrastructural investment required. In some years, funding allocated in the Public Capital Programme, hasn’t been spent.
Planning
Planning has undergone significant changes in recent years with a new Planning and Development Act, Compact Growth Guidelines to guide efficient land use for housing, and the revision of the National Planning Framework, the state’s overarching blueprint for planning.
Yet, delays in the planning system persist, highlighting the need for much stricter enforcement of decision-making timeframes to accelerate house building for the many people urgently in need of homes.
Ready to build
Home builders in Ireland are committed and ready to construct the homes desperately needed by those caught in the housing crisis and play a crucial role in addressing the backlog. As those on the ground, home builders experience first-hand the practical challenges of getting a housing development started and understand the obstacles for what they truly are. The process of building a home is the simplest part of the puzzle. We urgently need action, and we hope that the government will provide that momentum.
In short, housebuilders are ready to build more.
About Conor O’Connell
Conor O’Connell is the Housing, Planning & Development Director with the Construction Industry Federation. He is also Secretary of the CIF Regional Development Committee and is responsible for the development of CIF Regional Development Policy as well as stakeholder engagement on construction policy issues across government departments, semi-state agencies, local authorities, politicians and various regional bodies. He was previously the CIF Southern Region Director.