Sir, – Tánaiste Simon Harris’s defence of Ireland’s housing performance from comments by Irene Tinagli MEP, chair of the European Parliament’s special committee on the housing crisis, is extremely limited (“Harris pushes back on claim Irish housing crisis among ‘most severe’ in Europe,” May 29th).
Housing output numbers are meaningless without wider social and economic context. According to Daft.ie, the average price of a new home in Ireland in 2026 is €435,000, while the median national salary remains approximately €40,000. For many individuals – and even most working couples – newly built homes remain entirely unaffordable.
Recent stamp duty data also shows that increased supply is not necessarily benefiting ordinary households. In 2025, 3,219 new homes were purchased by individual households, while 4,079 were acquired by companies, funds and institutional buyers, albeit this number includes approved housing bodies and local authorities.
Numbers pertaining to the condition of existing social housing stock are also important. Research by Trinity College Dublin and The Liberties Community Project in Oliver Bond House found damp and mould in 82 per cent of surveyed homes, draughty conditions in 73 per cent and asthma prevalence 2.4 times higher than among individuals with addresses elsewhere in the same area.
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Oliver Bond House is just one of 212 multi-unit complexes managed by Dublin City Council, 90 of which are of a similar age profile, raising serious concerns that comparable physical conditions and associated health impacts exist in a considerable number of other communities across the city and country.
These are the real numbers of Ireland’s housing crisis and it is concerning that such data is left to community organisations and academic partners to collect while the State remains focused on abstract output figures disconnected from lived reality.
This concern was reflected in the Council of Europe’s Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) v Ireland 2014/110 decision, which found that Ireland had failed to ensure adequate housing standards for many local authority tenants and had failed to collect complete statistics on housing conditions for 15 years.
Until our senior politicians measure affordability and lived conditions as seriously as commencement numbers, Ireland’s housing crisis will remain unresolved. – Yours, etc,
AUSTIN CAMPBELL,
Chief executive,
The Liberties Community Project,
Dublin 8.
