Does the New Housing Plan Match the Scale of the Challenge?
“A home is where people build and plan their lives, raise their families, and connect with their communities.” With this line, the Government introduces Delivering Homes, Building Communities 2025–2030, stating that it recognises that having a place to call home is one of the most basic and important need in life. This is a sentiment Social Justice Ireland strongly shares. But the crucial question remains: does the plan actually deliver on this recognition? When examined closely, the strategy falls short of the scale, ambition and structural reform required to address Ireland’s long-standing housing crisis. The plan does not fully confront the depth of the challenge Ireland faces. For a housing system that has been under strain for so long, a strategy must be not only comprehensive but transformative. On this front, significant gaps remain. This article examines whether the targets match the true level of need.
The overall targets still fall short of what Ireland needs
The headline target of 300,000 homes by 2030 falls short of fully addressing the existing deficit and future demand. The Housing Commission’s report estimated a housing deficit of between 212,500 to 256,000 homes. Crucially, this deficit only represented an unmet need based on the Census 2022 figures (and the population has only increased since then), without accounting for future population growth, inward migration and the continued trend toward smaller household sizes.
The commitment to deliver 72,000 social homes over the lifetime of the strategy also fails to meet the scale of demand. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated that at least 115,425 households required social housing support in 2023. This figure does not account for households in RAS tenancies and households in receipt of Rent Supplement; leaving Direct Provision; new households fleeing war; households in refuges for domestic abuse; the majority of the homeless as currently counted; or all of the homeless not currently counted within official data (as would be counted under an ETHOS typology proposed by FEANSTA ). Social Justice Ireland has consistently highlighted that Ireland’s true social housing need is far larger than current official estimates. Years of under-delivery have left a deep backlog that cannot be resolved without sustained, large-scale public provision.
It is also disappointing that the government failed to set the target for 20 per cent of all housing stock to be social housing. Such a target would meaningfully support affordability challenges that many face and help lift families out of long-term homelessness, in line with Government commitments to prioritise social housing allocations for these families. Given the current deficit, however, achieving this will be extremely challenging.
The strategy’s target on vacancy and dereliction is equally inadequate. It commits to bringing 20,000 homes back into use through the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant and restoring 1,000 derelict homes for social housing via Buy and Renew and Repair and Lease schemes. Yet Ireland has between 101,000 and 164,000 vacant and derelict properties — an enormous latent resource at a time of acute housing need. These low targets simply do not reflect the scale of the opportunity or the urgency of the crisis.
A lack of clarity on delivery and tenure mix
A critical gap in the plan is the absence of transparency regarding how many homes will be delivered annually under each tenure type. While, it commits to an average of 12,000 social homes, it provides no overall annual delivery plans. Instead, it sets a broad target of 15,000 “Starter Homes” per year, which is essentially a rebranding of existing schemes such as the First Home Scheme, Help to Buy, the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant and cost-rental housing. There is also no clarity on how many homes will be delivered through each mechanism. This lack of detail weakens accountability and makes it difficult to assess whether the strategy will deliver meaningful progress, particularly for affordable housing.
Moreover, existing evidence shows that schemes such as Help to Buy and the First Home Scheme do not improve affordability. Rather than reducing prices, they inflate purchasing power, push prices higher in a supply-constrained market, undermine the Central Bank’s macroprudential rules and disproportionately benefit higher-income households buying more expensive homes. Instead of tackling the structural causes of high prices, these schemes artificially sustain them by subsidising demand.
Cost-rental housing, which has significant long-term potential to stabilise rents and provide secure, affordable homes, also lacks scale. The strategy does not specify how many cost-rental homes will be delivered annually or what proportion of the 15,000 “Starter Homes” will fall within this category. Without substantial expansion, cost-rental will remain marginal and will not shift Ireland away from over-reliance on the private rental market.
Continued dependence on market-led solutions
Although the strategy acknowledges the role of public housing, it remains heavily dependent on market-led solutions, including tax incentives, investor facilitation and demand-side subsidies. In a supply-constrained market, these measures risk driving prices even higher rather than improving affordability. Ireland’s housing system has become increasingly shaped by private profit and privatisation: developers building on State land, private landlords receiving significant subsidies to provide “social housing solutions”, private operators running emergency accommodation, and private investors dominating short-term, high-yield rental markets.
Social Justice Ireland has long argued that Ireland must shift away from this model and towards genuine structural, supply-side reform. This requires large-scale public and cost-rental housing delivery, stronger land management tools and robust taxation measures. Unfortunately, the new strategy does not make this shift. Despite welcome language and some positive commitments, the plan continues to rely on the private sector to deliver the majority of supply, a model that undermines affordability and leaves Ireland vulnerable to market cycles.
The next article in this series will focus on homelessness, examining whether the new strategy does enough to meaningfully prevent homelessness, support families and individuals in crisis, and deliver on the Government’s commitment to end homelessness.
