Ronan Lyons

Between 2015 and 2022, market rents increased by almost 75%, while in the same period, rents for sitting tenants increased by just 19%. And based on my analysis, Ireland is missing between 200,000 and 250,000 rental homes.

Unfortunately, we are at the peak of the construction cycle. While almost 30,000 homes were completed last year, just 22,300 were started – down from 25,400 in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of properties granted planning permission has fallen.

The property market started to cool noticeably at the end of 2022, while demand appears to have weakened further this year. And, based on the data, we are unlikely to see any upward pressure on prices over the coming months.

The volume of sale listings has recovered by about 40% over the course of 2021 and 2022, leaving it nationally only about 5% shy of its pre-Covid total. But as various trends over recent years suggest, the picture looks very different around the country.

Rail brings far less congestion than road transport, and we're right to push for it. But as 19th century Ireland shows, rail is no guarantee of growth.

The country is somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 rental homes short of where it needs to be. A prudent Housing Minister would be thinking about the upper end of that range, as each year sees additional unmet need.

Housing policy is fixated on a 1950s vision of Irish life that misses the growth of cities, small households, and assisted living.

Conceptually, it's very clear what needs to be done to fix the housing crisis. What's surprising is how the system actively works against this goal.

The politics of Irish housing are so perverse that a highly successful scheme to stimulate the production of rental homes is about to be cancelled for political reasons. Here's why Built-to-Rent worked, and why we still need it.

If the true cost of the levy is something like €4,000 per home, then the breakeven annual income needed to buy a home has been pushed up by €1,000. The government is making a generational crisis even worse.