Ireland’s plans to deliver housing and infrastructure are a roll of the dice |
Inspired by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s free-market ideology, successive governments in developed countries including Ireland have ceded control over the delivery of housing and infrastructure to the market. The effect of this has been a shift from self-sufficiency to a dependency on something beyond state control.
For Ireland, it means that our housing policy and infrastructure plans are no better than a roll of the dice.
When the State built plenty of housing both for rent and for sale, it was far easier to manage supply and to ramp up when required. But by 2024, local authorities were building just over one fifth of the headline number of 7,857 new-build social houses; the rest were mostly delivered by the market. The recent figure of 9,089 new social homes does not show how many were directly built by local authorities and how many were bought from the market, but it is safe to assume that the private sector accounts for a large proportion of it.
Having abrogated control over housing supply, the Government has turned to whatever tools it can access to encourage building. It has increasingly been deploying both carrots and sticks in the areas of planning, finance and, more recently, law, in the hope that something works.
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One effect of this is that planning standards have been reduced. The minimum size for an apartment is now just 32sq m, smaller than three car-parking bays. Densities have........