‘Recognise and prioritise dealing with Ireland’s housing deficit and address it through emergency action’ – Recommendation #1 Housing Commission
We have succeeded in normalising the unacceptable
25 January 2026 | editor@breakingground.news
This week Minister Jack Chambers updated Cabinet on the establishment and first meeting of the Joint Utilities and Transport Clearing House, designed as a practical intervention to remove barriers to delivery. This signals the implementation of Action 21 of the Accelerating Infrastructure Report and Action Plan.
The urgency is wholly justified.
2026 marks a full decade of Ireland’s crisis and, while Ireland’s government has stopped short of calling housing an ‘emergency’ to date, EU Commissioner for Energy and Housing Dan Jørgensen is edging ever closer. The question is no longer whether our housing system is failing. That is beyond dispute. The question is how it has failed so comprehensively, despite unprecedented levels of spending, and why government still refuses to treat the deficit as an emergency.
In a similar vein to the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce, Ireland’s Housing Commission was established in late 2021 by then-Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien to examine Ireland’s housing system, making recommendations for long-term, enduring policy, including potential constitutional changes regarding housing rights. Chaired by John O’Connor, former head of the Housing Agency, the Commission identified a significant housing deficit of 212,500 to 256,000 homes. The government accepted the 2024 report, initiating analysis for implementing its 83 recommendations.
But recommendation number one was unambiguous: ‘Recognise and prioritise dealing with Ireland’s housing deficit and address it through emergency action.’ This recommendation remains unactioned.
More than 18 months after publication of that multidisciplinary expert report, the Commission Chair expressed his view that policymakers did not understand the distinction between housing deficit and housing demand, instead adopting a one figure, one delivery approach – leaving the quarter-of-a-million home deficit completely unaddressed.
This want of understanding is breaking a generation.
Speaking to an industry audience, homebuilder and Commission member Michael O’Flynn said the report “deserved to be challenged, but what it didn’t deserve was to be left on the shelf…”
I am not a political analyst, but I understand how development projects get delivered on the ground. There is a tightening window to pull the right levers to ensure housing delivery during the lifetime of this current government. Bluntly, it is already too late for some levers.
So, there is a housing reality. And there is a political reality.
Those two realities are increasingly incompatible with delivering for people on the ground.
Latest data from Simon Communities shows that older people are increasingly at risk, with homelessness among older people more than doubled in five years. There are now more than 260 people over the age of 65 living in emergency accommodation. Within 24 hours of that report, newly released Housing Agency research points to private renters and under-25s facing the highest risk of combined housing and energy precarity in Ireland.
It has been a full decade since then Housing Minister Simon Coveney launched Rebuilding Ireland, the plan aimed at addressing homelessness, which faced criticism for its lack of ambition even then. In that decade, Ireland has spent in excess of €11 billion on housing, homelessness has multiplied, home ownership rates have dropped, affordability is a pipe dream, and we now have a costly sector tasked with managing rather than solving homelessness.
The scary question is this: if this government fails to get to grips with housing – or if we as a nation allow them to fail – what comes next?
A growing body of research shows a stark connection between housing affordability pressures and growing political extremism across Europe. That framing matters in Ireland. Because this is what we are sleepwalking into: the normalisation of a crisis that corrodes trust, fractures communities, and leaves space for the worst actors to thrive on grievance.
What I have observed – and what government appears to have forgotten – is not radical or ideological. It is basic.
Home ownership remains the most viable form of housing support over the long term. Rent was traditionally the low-cost way of living while you wait to afford a home of your own – not the high-cost way of surviving that means you can never aspire to one. How have we normalised families with two incomes being supported to pay rent, but never allowed to buy a home? It’s nonsense. Policymakers have succeeded in normalising the utterly unacceptable and if we, the people, continue to allow this to happen unchallenged, we are complicit.
I recently asked a member of the Public Accounts Committee if there was any appetite to interrogate the overall value for money being spent on the rental sector (both public and private) versus supporting home ownership. He actually laughed and said “we’d be afraid to”. I am afraid he meant it.
Ireland is experiencing a housing emergency, it is reckless to ignore this.
When Ireland treats something as an emergency, it delivers.
Emergency housing for Ukrainians was delivered at speed because it was exempted from normal planning pathways. Covid-era healthcare infrastructure was built rapidly because emergency frameworks replaced standard procurement and planning, and compliance with building standards was resequenced to follow delivery. MetroLink – arguably the most complex infrastructure project in the history of the State – is progressing precisely because it is treated as exceptional, with bespoke governance, procurement and decision-making structures.
Ireland can deliver. But only when it steps outside its own systems and rules.
What that says about our rules – and rulemakers – is a larger question for another day.
