Putting local government back at the heart of building Ireland’s communities?
Published: 13 November, 2025
Author: Seán Ó’Riordáin, LGIU Ireland Commissioner
The much-awaited new national policy on addressing the challenges of delivering homes across Ireland has finally been published. In the following briefing, we provide a broad overview of the action plan and its immediate relevance to the local government sector in Ireland.
This briefing will be of interest to readers in Ireland but also, given the general challenges on housing across the OECD, to readers in other jurisdictions.
The briefing indicates a hugely challenging set of actions, not just for local councils but also those in the approved housing sector, including the State Agencies, such as the Housing Finance Agency, the Housing Agency and the Land Development Agency, bodies like Uisce Éireann, among others, and, of course, the national authorities. It contains many proposals from delivering an effective doubling of the current annual output housing units to 2030, and developments in infrastructure, to advancing planning for housing over the long-term, and dealing with the State’s changing demographics.
In some ways, there is enough that is new relative to the outgoing policy, ‘Housing for All’, but there is a critical difference in the level of ambition to deliver new homes over the next five years. This is alongside a re-commitment to housing as the priority of the current government. It is hoped that the new policy will begin to turn around the delivery of badly needed accommodation for many individuals, families and communities across the Republic.
Whether this will actually be the case is, of course, something that can only be answered over the five years; however, to say that the Government is starting from a very challenging position would be something of an understatement.
