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The Central Statistics Office revealed today that the number of new dwellings completed last year was a full 10,000 fewer than claimed it would be by members of Government in the run up to last December’s general election, who said that they were looking good for 40,000 completions or so.
Not a good look, you might say.
The CSO figures released this morning stated that there were 30,330 new dwelling completions in the whole of 2024, a decrease of 6.7 percent from 2023 (when 32,525 were completed).
Ireland’s national housing plan, Housing for All, set out back in 2021 that, by 2024, the Government would “reach and exceed supply of 33,000 homes per year by 2024”. So they were roughly 3,000 homes short of that foundational target.
Not content with that goal, though, last August Taoiseach Simon Harris predicted that approximately 40,000 homes would be completed. When questioned on that, he said that the 40,000 figure came from a letter sent to party leaders by Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien.
Nevertheless, he stood by it.
Minister O’Brien didn’t just make that estimation privately, he stated it publicly in October too. There was some scepticism at the time, given that the ESRI and Central Bank estimates were in the lower half of the 30,000s.
Now that the cold light of post-election day has dawned, though, it looks like we once again have a case of Government-sanctioned misinformation on our hands. To reiterate, the number of completions last year was about 3,000 short of the target in the national plan, and almost 10,000 short of the figure offered by the Taoiseach and his housing minister.
Will they address that, given that they’ve essentially (although yet to be formally) returned to office in some sense or other? After all, combatting mis – and dis-information was given some central focus in the recent Programme for Government, being mentioned no less than nine times.
The plans to achieve this include empowering the Electoral Commission to “tackle the scourge of online disinformation and misinformation” around election time. A shame they weren’t so empowered ahead of last December’s election. Had they been, they might have at the very least raised some caution around the 40,000 proclamation, given its significance and the extent of its reportage. Plenty of others were doing so, based on some fairly reliable metrics.
On November 11 last year, Darragh O’Brien explicitly linked the 40,000 figure to the general election by quote tweeting a post about the election with information (misinformation) about how “Housing delivery has risen from 20,000 in 2020 approaching 40,000 homes this year”.
To zoom out and put the 2024 completion figure in some much-needed context: Last year’s Housing Commission report estimated Ireland’s housing deficit as being somewhere between 212,500 and 256,000 homes. That estimate refers to “pent-up” or pre-existing demand, before factors like inward migration or population growth are considered.
RTÉ, to be fair to them, calculated at the time that if you take the mid-range figure of 235,000 homes (between 212,500 to 256,000, as the commission did) as the “emergency” level required between 2025 and 2034, “an annual average of 23,500 homes would have to be delivered just to address the deficit, before future housing requirements are considered”.
“It is understood that this annual target, to address the deficit, would have to be delivered in addition to existing housing delivery plans.
“Under the Government’s Housing for All targets, an average of 33,000 homes are due to be delivered between 2022 and 2030.
“This would mean that the average annual delivery of homes between 2025 and 2034 would need to be in excess of 56,000 units.”
So we’re some way off that, if today’s CSO figures are anything to go by. The public ought to have been given a realistic assessment of the situation ahead of the general election, given the priority attributed to the housing crisis by so many voters, but they weren’t.
They were offered instead what has turned out to be a genuinely fantastical figure.
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