Ireland has finally established the Housing Activation Office – and the initial signs are good. The office appears to be working well with local authorities and is ponying up money to make smaller sites bigger, with funds being provided for roads and infrastructure where councils might not have the resources.
Local authorities are stepping up, too, and working in a more co-ordinated way to open significant landbanks, investing in roads, access points, water services and other infrastructure that turn zoned land into deliverable housing.
Without infrastructure, land will remain unused. What is now happening, in parts of the system, is an acknowledgment that the State must take a more active role in bridging that gap.
It is a good move to make sites bigger when the opportunity is there. It shows that the office’s leader, Garret Doocey, is focused on delivery.
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Doocey needs to supersize things though. The Activation Office, with local authorities, needs to go mega and put the focus on unlocking and delivering housing at scale by prioritising large, strategic sites.
Doocey should let local authorities worry about the sites for a few hundred houses and focus on ones that can accommodate thousands of homes. For much of the past decade housing output has been too small, and while each development contributes something, the system has been delivering numbers of units that are too small to solve a problem that is national in scale.
A shift in mindset is required. If Ireland is to address its housing shortfall, developments must be imagined and delivered at a different scale. This means thinking in terms of thousands of homes on single sites, not hundreds, and these homes need to be planned and delivered as integrated communities, rather than a series of disconnected phases.
The key issue is less about whether homes can be built, and more about whether the system is set up to deliver them in sufficient numbers. That comes down to co-ordination, prioritisation and overall direction
Large-scale development is not simply about speed, although that is important. It is about coherence, efficiency and certainty. When projects are delivered at scale, infrastructure can be planned from the outset, rather than retrofitted. Transport links, schools, green spaces and utilities can be designed as part of a whole. The result is not only more homes, but better-functioning places.
There is also a hard economic reality underpinning this argument. Construction costs remain high and viability is a persistent challenge. Smaller sites, with limited unit numbers, struggle to absorb these costs while delivering homes at prices that are accessible. Larger sites, by contrast, allow for economies of scale in procurement, design and delivery. They provide the volume necessary to spread infrastructure costs and to create commercially viable projects that can proceed. Scale is not just desirable – it is essential to unlocking supply.
This is where the Housing Activation Office must play a decisive role. Its value lies in its ability to operate across the traditional boundaries that have slowed delivery: between Government departments, local authorities, infrastructure providers and the private sector. But to be effective, it must resist the temptation to spread its efforts too thinly.
The risk with any new body is that it becomes involved in too many aspects of the system without fundamentally changing outcomes. The opportunity here is different. By concentrating on a defined pipeline of mega, strategic sites and by ensuring that the infrastructure required to unlock them is delivered quickly and in a co-ordinated manner, it can have a huge impact.
There are signs that this kind of co-ordinated approach is starting to take hold. Local authorities are increasingly recognising that enabling infrastructure is a necessary first step in delivery. Roads are being planned to support both existing and future communities, and services are being extended with growth in mind.
This reflects a positive shift in approach and is broadly in line with what is needed. However, progress is still uneven and, in many cases slow. Greater consistency, a stronger sense of urgency and clearer national direction would help to reinforce this approach across all relevant sites. This is where Doocey can come in and move the needle.
The broader context is also important. Ireland has many of the conditions needed to deliver housing at scale. The construction sector is in a strong place; demand remains high and both public and private funding are available. The key issue is less about whether homes can be built, and more about whether the system is set up to deliver them in sufficient numbers. That comes down to co-ordination, prioritisation and overall direction.
The Housing Activation Office provides the opportunity to address this. If it keeps its focus on unlocking large sites, aligning infrastructure with development, and providing greater certainty for delivery, it could help increase both the pace and scale of output. Its impact, however, will depend on how it operates within the existing system.
Ireland’s housing challenge requires a shift in how delivery is approached. This means moving beyond smaller, incremental development towards a model capable of delivering at scale. As the saying should be – go big and get the homes we need now.
Ciaran Fitzpatrick is co-founder and chief executive of Fitzpatrick & Heavey Homes
