Ronan Lyons

Despite the dismissal of tax breaks for property developers, a fact-based debate is needed on how to address Ireland's severe housing shortage. With a deficit of 250,000 homes and spiraling construction costs, it's time to reconsider supply-side solutions.

A move to within-tenancy controls, and adjusting up the percentage annual increase allowed, looks like the most effective compromise between ensuring certainty for sitting tenants and affordability for new ones.

The rise in home completions was largely driven by a surge in new apartments. But this surge has stopped due to the tightening of rent controls and the scrapping of Strategic Housing Developments, and Buy-to-Rent codes.

The market has seen something close to double-digit inflation despite (or on top of) all the increases seen in the previous decade. How has that happened?

New York’s experience with rent controls in the interwar years was – compared to other rent control systems – less painful. Rents were kept in check until new supply came on stream. There is nothing at the moment, however, to suggest that Ireland is following the same route.

Ireland is 13 years into a rental market crisis. Despite eight years of evidence the strategy of capping rents and diverting demand doesn’t work, not a single party has any real strategy for the rental sector.

There is a difference of almost 100,000 homes between the Department of Housing's estimate of the housing deficit and the Commission on Housing's. The reason is the department does not understand what unmet housing need actually is.

By any metric, Nepal is a poor country with limited public services. Yet, Ireland could take a leaf out of Nepal’s book and become literate in land values, writes Ronan Lyons in Kathmandu.

Nobody knows the break-even cost of a minimum standard home and how that relates to the local income distribution. Nor do we measure the number and size of homes people would choose, as opposed to the ones they currently live in.

Since 2020 in particular, the government has thrown a lot more money at the problem, in particular for social housing of various hues. It has done so while also effectively ignoring the growing deficit of rental homes around the country.