Whether the metric be output or availability or cost – there’s just no such thing as good news in the lugubrious world of Ireland’s housing crisis.
Each report, each set of numbers, each rowdy Dáil debate seems another slice in this bricks-and-mortar death by a thousand cuts. No matter how much they build, the positive PR efforts of a Government intent on fixing the problem just keep on crumbling down around them.
Daft.ie’s latest quarterly price report reflects not only the spiralling costs keeping so many out of homes, but also the hollowing out of second-hand supply, now at its lowest since the property website began compiling its market health reports in 2007.
Average house price inflation in the first quarter of the year was at 3.7 per cent, but was far higher than that for anyone with any notion of living in a city. Ronan Lyons, the Trinity College Dublin economist and report author, says the latest data “shows that the surge in inflation is not yet over”. It is bad news and comes amid a swirl of other ominous signs.
In recent days it has emerged that apartment construction in Dublin has begun to falter, in numeric terms, with Minister for Housing James Browne publicly acknowledging this “completely wrong direction”. As a new Minister he can afford such candidness but something must be done to arrest the decline.
There are intensifying concerns in Government, too, that what is ultimately built will fall short of targets announced during the general election campaign.
The problems run deep. Planning experts have said that without an update to the National Planning Framework, a guidance document for supply, those targets cannot be met.
What everyone can agree upon – whether through reports, updates, data or debates – is that the answer is, and always has been, supply. Or as Lyons puts it simply in his latest report: “The ultimate solution remains unchanged from that which was needed a decade ago: a lot more homes need to be built, so that the country’s housing is adequate for its households.”
Good or bad, that will hardly be news to the Government.
