Housing data has made for grim reading in recent years. Home completions have been sluggish as rents rise and homeless figures hit record levels.
A new metric is now available that illustrates the difficulties experienced by those caught in the housing crisis.
How long would it take an adult who typically falls into the “first-time buyers” age bracket to obtain a new home in their locality based on current building rates? The answer in 18 of 166 electoral districts in the State is more than 100 years.
The longest wait is in Dublin’s Palmerstown-Fonthill where just three homes were built last year in an electoral area that has 5,595 people aged between 18 and 44 who are not homeowners. On average, they would have to wait 1,865 years at the current rate of construction to get a home in their locality.
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The figures have been compiled by Rob Cass, director of Irish Sustainable Homes, and Edward Dixon, a data analyst and chief executive of Rigr AI. They have set up a website – onemillionhomes.ie – showcasing their findings. The analysis is calculated based on fixed census population data. It considers newly built homes and does not take the second-hand market into account.
Both men say they were motivated to compile the figures by examining the extent of house building at a local level and by concern for younger people who will be left without homes of their own as adults.
Their calculations are based on dividing the number of 18 to 44-year-olds who are not homeowners in each area by the number of homes built in that area over the past year. From this, Cass and Dixon calculate the average wait for a home based on the previous year’s rate of home building.
In the State as a whole, there were 1.3 million people in the relevant demographic bracket and 36,284 homes built last year, according to data from the 2022 census and the Central Statistics Office respectively.
Senior lecturer on housing at Technological University Dublin (TUD) Lorcan Sirr said the figures provide “very useful information” for would-be renters and homeowners.
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“These are data guys and breaking it down by postcode is really interesting. This could be a really useful tool.”
In Celbridge, the wait would be 337.7 years, Ongar 226.4 years, Ballymahon 215.7 years and Artane-Whitehall 193.8 years. These are based on individual figures, but even if each home was occupied by a couple, many people would be waiting more than a century for a home of their own.
The electoral area with the highest rate of growth is Drogheda Rural where 630 homes were built last year for a target 18-44 population of 5,015 people without homes of their own. But even that figure would see an individual waiting eight years for their own home. Blanchardstown/Mulhuddard (9.2 years) and Clondalkin (9.6 years) are the only electoral areas where the average wait will be below 10 years.
The counties with the highest rate of new builds are Kildare (27.0 per 1,000), followed by Laois (24.5 per 1,000) and Wicklow (24.0 per 1,000). The counties with the least amount of new builds per capita are Kerry (8.3 per 1,000), Monaghan (7.7 per 1,000) and Donegal (5.3 per 1,000). The county with the fastest-expanding housing growth is Louth where new builds went up by 24 per cent in 2025.
The research also reveals that there were no new homes for first-time buyers built in 21 Dublin postcodes last year, nor in 57 other postcodes in the State.
At the other end of the scale the top three postcodes for first-time buyers are C15 (Navan), X91 (Waterford) and K36 (Malahide).
The Department of Housing was contacted for comment.
Regarding the discovery that Palmerstown-Fonthill recorded the longest wait for housing, local Sinn Féin councillor Niamh Fennell said this was not a surprise. “There is nowhere left to build. It had the most concentrated housing in the county,” she said.
Another local councillor, Madeleine Johansson, said there were not many opportunities to build new homes in the area, but this may change if the Clonburris Strategic Development Zone was activated for housing.
Having looked at the figures, Sirr says: “It’s a snapshot in time so it might not all be like this, but they are spot on about the first-time buyers deserts. First-time buyers are buying further and further away from Dublin.
“For the last four years, 95 per cent of homes built in Dublin have been apartments and 95 per cent of those have been for rent.”
Dixon said he was concerned for his four children, aged between 11 and 17, and the prospects for them to own a home of their own.
“I thought it would be helpful to do the research in more detail. I do software for policing and defence and we normally tackle problems by breaking them down into pieces so small that we can understand them,” he said.
The pair said breaking down homebuilding on a smaller scale improves political and administrative accountability, and they have included all the local councillors and TDs for each area in their survey.
Cass said there was a disconnect between job creation in this decade and housing demand. There have been 550,000 jobs created in the Irish economy in the last 10 years, but only 200,000 homes.
“This is the first time in history we haven’t matched homes to jobs. We have high unemployment,” he said.
They also included the potential impact on the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). The association has already produced a report, No One Shouted Stop Until Now, published in December, in which it stated that many clubs will go out of existence because of demographic changes. There are fewer children being born and much of that is down to a lack of housing.
The website name, onemillionhomes.ie, reflects the estimated number of homes that will be needed each decade to cope with demand.
They conclude that only one electoral area in the country, Drogheda Rural, is building enough homes to sustain future GAA teams, one is under pressure, 20 will survive with mergers and the other 144 clubs will not have enough young people to sustain them because of the absence of housing.
“If you don’t have homes, you don’t have kids. You need 25 homes to give 50 kids a year. Once you get a home, you repopulate the parish,” Cass said.
“The map is bleak because we are not sustaining the levels needed to populate parishes. Clubs will be dead and I don’t use that phrase lightly.”
Shortest wait for a home
- Drogheda Rural: 8 years
- Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart, Co Dublin: 9.2 years
- Clondalkin, Co Dublin: 9.6 years
- Killiney-Shankill, Co Dublin: 10 years
- Rush-Lusk, Co Dublin: 10.7 years
- Wicklow, Co Wicklow: 12.4 years
- Southeast inner-city Dublin: 13.7 years
- North inner-city Dublin: 13.9 years
- Leixlip, Co Kildare 16.2 years
- Portlaoise, Co Laois: 17.2 years
- Tallaght central, Co Dublin: 17.5 years
- Athlone, Co Roscommon: 17.7 years
- Lucan, Co Dublin: 19.6 years
- Athlone, Co Westmeath: 20.4 years
- Glencullen-Sandyford, Co Dublin: 20.6 years
- Mullingar, Co Westmeath: 20.6 years
- Athy, Co Kildare: 21.2 years
- Trim, Co Meath: 21.7 years
- Tallaght South: 22.1 years
- Dundalk South: 22.1 years
Longest wait for a home
- Palmerstown-Fonthill, Co Dublin: 1,352 years
- Celbridge, Co Kildare: 337.7 years
- Ongar, Fingal, Co Dublin: 226.4 years
- Ballymahon, Co Longford: 215.7 years
- Artane-Whitehall, Co Dublin: 193.8 years
- Limerick City North: 191.6 years
- Lismore, Co Waterford: 137.2 years
- Longford town: 136.8 years
- Listowel, Co Kerry: 132.1 years
- Blackrock, Co Dublin: 131.3 years
- Castleisland, Co Kerry: 123.2 years
- Roscommon town: 115.6 years
- Newport, Co Tipperary: 113.5 years
- Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim: 109.4 years
- Kanturk, Co Cork: 106.6 years
- Cork City south-central: 102.6 years
- Buncrana, Co Donegal: 102.1 years
- Dungarvan, Co Waterford: 99 years
- Ballina, Co Mayo: 93.3 years
- Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan: 93 years
