From warehouses to small houses, the Construction Industry Federation knows what is being built in Ireland. So when Conor O’Connell, its director of housing and planning said on RTÉ in January that “we were slightly taken by surprise” by the figure of 36,284 new house completions announced by the Government for 2025, it raised a few questions – including could new house completions really have increased by an impressive 20.4 per cent without the CIF being aware of it? It was expecting a figure of about 34,000.
Little is straightforward in housing, so the answer is – well it depends.
A house is counted as new when it is connected to the electricity grid. There were indeed 36,284 new residential connections to the grid in 2025. However, a connection to the electricity grid does not mean a new house is legally ready to occupy. Far from it. Concrete shells with no flooring, kitchens, bathrooms or plastered walls are included in the figures for new homes once they have power. It can easily be six months between connecting a new house or apartment to electricity and it being legal to occupy. As such, it seems many new houses are being forward-counted annually.
We’ve been here before. Between 2011 and 2017, the Department of Housing knowingly over-counted new housing completions by 58 per cent.
READ MORE
In his autobiography, Running from Office, former minister for housing Eoghan Murphy recounts what happened when he instructed his officials to calculate new housing completions more accurately: “If we get the right figure, it will show that the figure that we have been using is the wrong one, minister.”
“Yes, I know that. But everybody already knows it’s the wrong figure,” I replied.
“Yes, but the right figure will show fewer houses, minister.”
We’re not back to double-counting new housing as officials did then, but the current method is misleading. According to an unnamed industry professional interviewed as part of a 2025 research project by Prof Rob Kitchin of Maynooth University, forward-counting manipulates the figures to flatter official policy. The levers are pulled “to make sure the numbers fit the narrative,” the person said.
The Building Control Management System (BCMS) records notifications that buildings have been completed to the required standards and are now legal to occupy. Including one-off houses, the BCMS recorded about 30,000 new houses being legally completed in 2025.
If electricity connections overestimate house completions by forward-counting, the BCMS may underestimate them through delays in recording completion certificates. The discrepancies between the two systems means that the real number of new houses completed in 2025 remains a mystery.
The only way to achieve total clarity would be a unified system that tracks everything from planning application to completion and to sales price or rent achieved. We could then see who was applying for what, whether they started building or not, how long it took and how affordable it was. It would bring transparency and competitiveness to the market and a better understanding of the process of development, including the size of developer and productivity.
According to official CSO figures – which are calculated using connections to the grid – scheme houses, or traditional housing estates, comprised half of all new houses last year, down 18 per cent since 2018. One-off houses are down significantly to just one in six of all new housing, or about 6,000 houses. In 2018, that was one in four.
Encouraged by planning and financial policy, including taxpayer-funded grants of up to €144,000 per unit, apartment output increased nearly 39 per cent from 2024, according to the CSO. Almost all new housing in Dublin city since 2022 has been apartments, nearly all for the State or investment companies.
New figures published by the CSO on Wednesday revealed that the median sales price of a new apartment in Dublin city was €679,500 and €750,000 for a house. That €144,000 might be better given to local authorities to bring down costs for people who need more affordable housing.
In reality, fewer than one in three of all new houses made it to the open market for buyers last year. About one in six were bought by investors, councils and Approved Housing Bodies.
In Dublin city, the CSO figures show, a paltry 58 new houses and 150 new apartments were sold to ordinary buyers last year, from an output of 4,521. In Cork city, from almost 1,500 new homes, just 11 new apartments and 19 new houses were sold on the open market.
This is not a dysfunctional market as commentary often suggests. The market is behaving exactly as expected given Government policy.
Two politicians said the quiet bits out loud recently, but not to each other. Firstly, minister for Education James Lawless acknowledged in an interview with The Irish Times that Ireland’s future housing supply is not being decided in Leinster House by middle-aged politicians and civil servants. “[Housing] is about international markets. It’s actually a spreadsheet in Zurich or New York or Antwerp, more so than a builder looking at a site in Longford or Roscommon, that’s actually deciding what happens here.”
He is right: it is being determined by 28-year-old investment analysts with three languages, two degrees and one large monthly pay cheque, commuting to work on a vintage scooter in Singapore or Frankfurt. Unelected, unaccountable and uncontrollable, they have more clout than the minister for housing.
Councillor Deirdre Heney, chair of Dublin City Council’s housing committee, wondered – apparently with the best of intentions – if the council could encourage people away from the city. The data shows that this is happening already – because what is being built is not affordable either to rent or buy.
This would not be the case if the Government hadn’t effectively outsourced control of housing supply.
In 1957, Aneurin Bevan warned of letting market forces “take the place of political responsibility”. However, since then, this is exactly what has happened globally in health, energy, water, transport and now housing.
In housing, the old order of self-build and family homes for ownership – rational, deeply embedded practices creating stable institutions of society – finds itself under threat from a new order of housing typologies, funders and tenures. The result will be an undermining of social stability as disillusioned and frustrated young voters seek homes to buy, and when they don’t find them, risk turning to the political margins or simply emigrate.
And still we can’t say how many houses we’re building.
Lorcan Sirr is a senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin
