Why Ireland’s High Incomes Are No Longer Enough to Make a Home Affordable

A typical home purchased in Ireland now costs close to €400,000. In the twelve months to June 2026, the median transaction price reached €396,000, while residential property prices were 5.6% higher than a year earlier. Average weekly earnings also increased, reaching €1,046.88 in the second quarter of 2026, but they rose by 3.9% — slower than property prices. The result is one of the central economic contradictions of modern Ireland: the country has high employment, rising incomes and considerable national wealth, yet home ownership has become increasingly difficult for large parts of a generation.

The apparent contradiction disappears once housing is treated not simply as something purchased with income, but as a scarce physical asset produced by a complex system. Ireland has added people, jobs, businesses and purchasing power considerably faster than it has added homes in many of the years since the financial crisis. At the same time, construction requires serviced land, planning permission, water, wastewater capacity, electricity, roads, finance, skilled labour and enough expected selling or rental income to make development viable. When one or more of those elements is constrained, higher incomes can push prices upwards without producing homes quickly enough.

For first-time buyers the consequences are particularly visible. They compete not only with each other but with established households, investors and purchasers who may have accumulated equity from previous homes. They must also satisfy mortgage lending limits while frequently paying high rents during the years in which they are trying to save a deposit. Ireland’s housing affordability problem is therefore not the result of a single policy, institution or demographic change. It is the cumulative outcome of a construction collapse, a powerful economic recovery, population growth, constrained supply, rising development costs and a housing system that has struggled to adjust at the speed required.

The Shortage Began With an Extraordinary Construction Collapse

To understand today’s prices, it is necessary to return to the years before and after the financial crisis. Ireland entered the mid-2000s with an enormous construction industry. CSO historical data records 88,419 dwelling completions in 2006. The level was unsustainable in the context of the property and credit boom, but what followed was not a gradual adjustment to a normal level of construction. It was a collapse.

Completions fell to 78,027 in 2007, 51,724 in 2008 and 26,420 in 2009. By 2010 there were only 14,602 completions, and the total reached just 8,301 in 2013. In seven years, annual output had fallen by more than 90% from its 2006 peak.

The collapse did more than reduce the number of houses being built during the recession. Developers failed, construction employment disappeared, projects were abandoned, development finance contracted and skilled workers left the sector or the country. Banks emerging from enormous property losses became much more cautious about development lending. A housing industry capable of delivering tens of thousands of homes had been substantially dismantled.

That contraction was understandable in the immediate aftermath of a historic property crash. Ireland had excess housing in some places, enormous financial distress and weak demand. The longer-term problem emerged when the economy and population recovered much faster than the construction system did.

Housing supply has since recovered substantially. The 36,284 homes completed in 2025 represented a 20.4% increase on 2024 and the highest annual total since the current CSO completions series began in 2011. That is important progress. But comparing today’s output with the exceptionally inflated 2006 construction boom is not the correct measure of success; the relevant question is whether Ireland is now building enough homes for its current and future population while also reducing the shortage accumulated during previous years.

Population and Housing Moved at Different Speeds

The OECD has identified this divergence as one of the defining characteristics of Ireland’s modern housing problem. Between 2011 and 2022, more than 550,000 people were added to Ireland’s resident population, while the overall pool of residential dwellings expanded by only about 117,000 units. The number of dwellings per 1,000 inhabitants consequently fell rather than increased.

That matters because a housing market cannot indefinitely absorb population and household growth without adding corresponding capacity. More people do not translate one-for-one into more homes because households contain different numbers of people, but population growth raises the underlying requirement for accommodation. Household formation, separation, ageing and the growing number of people living alone can increase housing demand even without equivalent population growth.

The pressure has continued. Ireland’s usually resident population was estimated at 5,525,600 in April 2026, an increase of 66,900 in one year. Net migration contributed 48,100 to that increase, while births exceeded deaths by approximately 18,800. Immigration is therefore an important component of housing demand, but describing migration itself as the cause of Ireland’s housing crisis would confuse demand with the system’s ability to respond to it.

A growing economy normally attracts workers and increases household formation. The structural problem arises when housing production and infrastructure cannot expand at comparable speed. Ireland would still require substantial additional housing even under lower migration assumptions because of existing unmet demand, demographic change, household formation and replacement of obsolete stock.

Research by the Economic and Social Research Institute illustrates the scale. Across twelve demographic and household scenarios, it estimated average structural housing demand of about 44,000 homes a year between 2023 and 2030. Depending on assumptions, the range runs from roughly 35,000 to 53,000 annually. Crucially, the analysis does not include all accumulated pent-up demand from households unable to form independently because suitable accommodation was unavailable or unaffordable.

Ireland Is Building More Homes — but the Gap Has Not Yet Disappeared

The comparison between the ESRI’s structural demand estimates and actual completions helps explain why prices can continue rising even when construction is improving. Ireland delivered 36,284 homes in 2025. That was a substantial increase, but it remained below the ESRI’s approximately 44,000 annual average structural requirement before any additional allowance for pent-up demand.

The 2026 data have also been uneven. There were 8,823 completions in the second quarter, 3.6% fewer than in the same quarter of 2025. Apartment completions declined by 12.2%, while scheme-house completions increased by 2%. Dublin recorded a 16.4% year-on-year fall in total completions during the quarter.

One quarter should not be treated as a forecast for the full year, and housing construction can fluctuate considerably because large apartment projects are completed in blocks. The broader point is that Ireland has not yet demonstrated sustained annual delivery comfortably above new structural demand for enough years to eliminate the accumulated shortage.

That distinction is fundamental. Building 40,000 homes in a year when approximately 40,000 new homes are required does not necessarily repair a shortage created during earlier years. It may simply prevent the deficit from becoming much larger. Affordability normally improves structurally when supply persistently catches up with both current demand and part of the backlog.

High National Income Does Not Mean Every Household Can Buy a High-Priced Home

Ireland’s economic success can make the affordability crisis appear even more puzzling. Employment is high and earnings have been rising. Yet aggregate national prosperity, average earnings and the income available to an individual first-time buyer are very different concepts.

The CSO recorded average weekly earnings of €1,046.88 in the second quarter of 2026. Annualised purely for illustration, that is approximately €54,438 in gross earnings. Average earnings are not the same as median earnings and do not describe every worker, but the figure provides a useful way to show how mortgage lending rules interact with house prices.

Under the Central Bank’s mortgage measures, a first-time buyer can generally borrow up to four times gross income, while a principal dwelling mortgage generally cannot exceed 90% of the property’s value. Lenders must also conduct their own affordability assessment, and limited proportions of lending can be issued above the macroprudential limits.

A single person earning the current average weekly amount would therefore have a standard loan-to-income ceiling of approximately €217,751. If the purchaser provided exactly a 10% deposit and no exemption applied, that mortgage would support a property price of about €241,946. The national median transaction price is €396,000.

This is deliberately a simplified model. Many first-time buyers purchase as couples and therefore combine two incomes. Some earn considerably above the national average, some below it, and buyers may have deposits larger than 10%. Banks also assess other debts, dependants and living costs. The example nevertheless demonstrates why a strong national average salary does not automatically make the typical home affordable to a single earner.

A €396,000 property financed at 90% loan-to-value would require a mortgage of €356,400 and a deposit of €39,600. Under a strict four-times-income calculation, the borrower or borrowers would need combined gross income of approximately €89,100 before the bank considered their other affordability circumstances. The deposit therefore solves only one part of the equation; sufficient income to support the mortgage is the other.

Mortgage Rules Limit What Buyers Can Bid — Deliberately

It can be tempting to argue that affordability could be restored simply by allowing banks to lend first-time buyers substantially more. Ireland has experience of where that route can lead. Before the financial crisis, rapid credit expansion, rising land values, speculative development and increasing property prices reinforced one another.

The Central Bank introduced mortgage measures in 2015 specifically to reduce the risk that mortgage credit and house prices could again enter an unsustainable feedback loop. The rules impose loan-to-income and loan-to-value limits so that banks and households retain greater resilience if unemployment rises, interest rates change or property values fall.

This creates a difficult but important distinction. Credit restrictions can make it harder for an individual buyer to match the price demanded for a scarce home, but allowing every buyer to borrow more does not create an additional home. When supply is constrained, broader credit availability can instead give competing buyers greater purchasing power against the same number of properties.

Today’s market is therefore fundamentally different from the years immediately preceding 2008. The Central Bank said in its November 2025 Financial Stability Review that the relationship between unsustainable lending and house prices seen during the global financial crisis was not apparent in the current market. Mortgage lending had broadly grown in line with incomes, while the shortage of housing supply had become a more prominent driver of prices.

That does not mean property prices cannot fall. A recession, job losses, a financial shock or a sharp fall in demand could weaken prices. It means that high prices alone are not evidence that Ireland has recreated the same bank-funded credit bubble that preceded the previous crash.

Prices Are Now Above the Celtic Tiger Peak — but That Comparison Needs Context

The scale of the recovery since the crash is striking. The national Residential Property Price Index in June 2026 stood 26.5% above its April 2007 property-boom peak and 182.1% above its early-2013 trough. Those are nominal index comparisons and should not be confused with inflation-adjusted changes in purchasing power, but they show how completely the post-crisis price collapse has been reversed.

The OECD found that even after adjusting for inflation, Irish house prices increased at an average annual rate of 5.5% between 2013 and 2023, one of the fastest rates in the OECD and faster than household disposable income. That period coincided with strong employment and income growth, very low interest rates for much of the decade and a housing stock that expanded too slowly.

In other words, rising incomes contributed to demand, but they did so inside a supply-constrained system. When thousands of households receive higher salaries without a comparable increase in the number of homes in the locations where those households want to live, part of the extra purchasing power can be absorbed into higher property values.

The Geography of the Crisis Has Changed

Ireland does not have a single housing market. The median dwelling price in the twelve months to June 2026 was €500,000 in Dublin, compared with €396,000 nationally. Within Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown it reached €682,334, while Longford’s median was €198,000.

Those enormous differences partly reflect employment geography, incomes, transport connections, land values, housing types and access to services. A cheaper house in a distant county is not necessarily a substitute for a home close to a person’s job, childcare, family network or public transport. The effective cost of housing therefore includes commuting time and transport expenditure as well as the mortgage itself.

Pressure is also spreading beyond the capital. Residential property prices outside Dublin increased by 6.4% in the year to June 2026, compared with 4.6% in Dublin. House prices in the Border region rose by 10.5%, while the Midlands recorded 10.0% growth.

This geographic movement has several possible explanations acting together. Buyers priced out of Dublin may search farther away, hybrid working can broaden the locations available to some employees, and strong demand in regional towns can meet even more restricted local supply. The result is that affordability can deteriorate outside Dublin even while absolute prices remain lower.

The Cost of Building a Home Is Much More Than Bricks and Labour

If property prices are high, an obvious question follows: why do developers not simply build much more? In a competitive market, high prices normally attract additional supply. Housing is unusually slow to respond because producing a home requires far more than construction labour and materials.

A government residential construction cost study found that direct construction costs account for approximately half of total residential development costs. The remainder can include land acquisition, professional fees, finance, taxation, marketing and other development expenses. Infrastructure can require additional investment, while delays increase financing costs because capital remains tied up before a completed property produces revenue.

Construction standards also matter. Modern homes must meet requirements relating to energy efficiency, fire safety, accessibility and building quality. These standards provide genuine long-term benefits to residents and society, particularly through lower energy use and safer buildings, but specifications can affect upfront construction costs. The policy challenge is therefore not simply to remove standards but to achieve quality more efficiently through design, standardisation, technology and productivity.

A project that appears profitable when a completed apartment can sell for €500,000 may become unviable if land, finance, construction and infrastructure costs rise significantly before completion. Apartment projects are particularly sensitive because they are capital intensive, can take years to plan and build, and require substantial investment before any individual unit is occupied.

Serviced Land Is One of the Hidden Constraints

Ireland may have land zoned for housing without that land being immediately capable of supporting thousands of homes. Development requires water supply, wastewater treatment, electricity connections, roads, transport and sometimes schools and other public infrastructure. A planning permission cannot by itself supply these services.

This is why infrastructure has moved closer to the centre of national housing policy. In June 2026, the Government announced the first 82 projects approved under the €1 billion Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund. The Department of Housing estimates that those projects can directly enable 86,000 homes and could potentially facilitate a further 113,000.

The numbers should not be confused with completed homes. An infrastructure project that unlocks capacity does not guarantee that every potential dwelling will immediately be financed, permitted, constructed and sold. It nevertheless illustrates the scale at which missing infrastructure can prevent otherwise developable land from becoming actual housing.

Housing therefore depends on coordination between systems that traditionally operate on different timetables. Local plans, utility investment, transport projects, private financing and construction programmes must converge at approximately the right moment. When they do not, years can pass between identifying land for housing and families moving into completed homes.

Planning Is Part of the Problem — but It Is Not the Whole Problem

Planning delays are frequently cited as a reason for slow housing supply, and lengthy permission, appeal and judicial processes can unquestionably add time and uncertainty to development. Ireland has begun a major reform through the Planning and Development Act 2024, with implementation being phased in over subsequent years.

Yet planning cannot explain every undeveloped site. A permission may exist while a project remains commercially unviable, infrastructure may be unavailable or financing may not be secured. Conversely, weakening planning without solving utilities, finance and construction capacity would not automatically produce sufficient homes.

The deeper challenge is predictability. Builders, local authorities, utilities and investors make multi-year decisions. A system that can establish where substantial housing will be built, what infrastructure will serve it, when approvals will be decided and what standards will apply makes investment easier to price and finance.

The Apartment Shortage Matters More Than It First Appears

The composition of Ireland’s housing stock is another structural factor. The OECD noted that apartments and flats accounted for only 14% of dwellings in 2022, the lowest share among EU countries and far below the OECD average of more than 40%. Single houses represented 42% of Ireland’s housing stock.

A country can have strong demand for smaller households while continuing to produce a housing mix that is relatively land intensive. Young professionals, students, older people seeking to downsize and single-person households do not all require a three-bedroom suburban house. A greater range of apartments, duplexes and smaller homes can therefore increase the number of households accommodated on serviced urban land.

Density also affects infrastructure. Lower-density development generally requires more road, pipe and utility network per household and can increase car dependence. Higher-density development near employment and public transport can use scarce urban land more efficiently, although apartment construction itself can be expensive and technically complex.

The fall in apartment completions during the second quarter of 2026 is therefore noteworthy. It is too early to infer a lasting trend from one quarter, but sustained apartment delivery is likely to be important if Ireland is to accommodate population growth without continually extending commuter belts.

Expensive Renting Makes Becoming a Buyer More Difficult

For many first-time buyers, the route to ownership begins in the rental market. That creates another feedback loop. The latest RTB and ESRI Rent Index available in May 2026 put the standardised average rent for a new tenancy at €1,755 a month in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 5% in a year. Existing tenancies averaged €1,503.

A household paying a high monthly rent must simultaneously cover utilities, transport, food, childcare and other living costs while trying to accumulate a house deposit. Rising salaries can therefore be partly absorbed before savings increase. Two households with identical gross incomes can have dramatically different capacity to buy if one can live with parents while saving and the other must pay market rent.

This has an intergenerational consequence. Family wealth increasingly influences the speed with which some younger adults can enter the property market. Assistance with deposits, an inheritance or the ability to remain in a family home can significantly change the equation, while buyers without those advantages must rely more heavily on income and personal savings.

The issue is not merely whether a household can eventually secure a mortgage. Delayed access to stable housing can affect decisions about marriage, children, employment and where to live. It can also push workers farther from major employment centres, increasing commuting and infrastructure pressure.

Ireland Is Becoming a Country Where Ownership Happens Later

The change has already been visible over several decades. Census 2022 found that the age at which more than half of householders owned their home had risen to 36. In 1991, the crossover between renting and ownership occurred at age 26. It moved to 27 in 2002, 28 in 2006, 32 in 2011 and 35 in 2016.

The age at which two-thirds of householders owned their homes changed even more dramatically. It was 28 in 1991 and 44 by 2022. These figures pre-date the latest 2026 price increases, so they should not be presented as a current measure of ownership, but they reveal a long-running structural shift.

Later ownership changes the distribution of wealth because home equity has historically been one of the principal assets accumulated by Irish households. People who purchase later have fewer working years in which to repay a mortgage before retirement and fewer years in which to benefit from capital appreciation. Those who never enter ownership may face housing costs much later in life than generations who reached retirement with mortgage-free homes.

A €396,000 Median Home Is Not Equally Expensive to Everyone

Housing affordability is fundamentally relational: it depends on the price of a home compared with the buyer’s income, savings and financing costs. For an established household selling a property that has appreciated substantially, a €396,000 purchase may be manageable because existing equity provides a large deposit. For a first-time buyer beginning with savings and wages alone, the same property can be exceptionally difficult.

This is one reason house-price increases redistribute opportunities even when no cash changes hands. Existing owners experience an increase in the market value of their assets. Future buyers face a higher entry price. Parents who own property may eventually pass some of that wealth to their children, while families without property have less housing wealth to transfer.

The divide is therefore not simply between high-income and low-income workers. It increasingly runs between households that already possess housing equity and households trying to acquire their first stake in the market.

Interest Rates Fell From Their Recent Highs — but Large Mortgages Remain Expensive

Financing conditions have improved from the sharp interest-rate shock that followed the inflation surge earlier in the decade. The weighted average rate on new Irish mortgage agreements was 3.49% at the end of June 2026. Fixed-rate agreements accounted for 93% of new mortgage volume.

But affordability depends on both the interest rate and the principal borrowed. A lower rate cannot completely compensate for a property price that has risen sharply. Using the current 3.49% average mortgage rate purely as an illustration, a €356,400 mortgage repaid over 30 years would require principal-and-interest payments of approximately €1,598 per month. Actual mortgage costs vary by lender, product, term and borrower and additional ownership expenses are not included in that calculation.

A smaller €217,751 mortgage — approximately four times annualised current average weekly earnings for one worker — would produce an illustrative payment of about €977 a month on the same assumptions. The difference shows why the size of the initial property price matters even when interest rates moderate.

Buyer Supports Can Bridge a Gap, but They Cannot Manufacture Supply

Ireland has introduced several mechanisms intended to help households cross the gap between savings, mortgage capacity and the price of a new home. These include the Help to Buy incentive and the First Home Scheme, alongside public affordable-purchase programmes and other measures.

Such programmes can make an enormous difference to an individual household that is otherwise just short of the deposit or purchase price. They can also support demand for newly built homes and improve the viability of developments. But buyer-side assistance does not remove the underlying physical constraint when too few homes are available.

This creates an unavoidable policy tension. If purchasing power is increased in a market where supply cannot respond, some of the additional demand can be reflected in prices. If assistance is closely connected to additional new supply, the effect can be different because the policy is helping transactions occur while also supporting construction. The design, scale and supply response therefore matter as much as the existence of the subsidy itself.

No buyer-support programme can substitute for a sustained increase in housing capacity. The long-term affordability solution depends primarily on producing enough appropriate homes in the places where people need them.

Why Simply Forcing Prices Down Would Carry Its Own Risks

For first-time buyers, a sharp fall in house prices may sound unambiguously positive. Economically, however, the route by which prices fall matters. A decline caused by a major increase in housing supply would be very different from a decline caused by mass unemployment, a banking crisis or a severe recession.

A financial-crisis-style collapse could reduce nominal prices while simultaneously making mortgages harder to obtain, destroying jobs and leaving recent purchasers in negative equity. Ireland experienced precisely these dynamics after 2008. Affordable housing policy therefore cannot sensibly aim simply at producing the largest possible decline in property values.

A more durable objective is to reduce the price-to-income burden over time. That can occur if housing supply expands strongly, nominal house-price growth slows substantially and household incomes continue rising. Under that path, homes gradually become more affordable relative to earnings without requiring another destructive property crash.

Housing Has Become an Economic Competitiveness Problem

The effects extend beyond prospective homeowners. Employers need workers to live within reasonable distance of jobs. Hospitals need nurses, schools need teachers, restaurants need staff, technology companies need engineers and construction firms themselves need tradespeople. If accommodation near employment centres becomes unaffordable, recruitment becomes harder or wages must rise simply to compensate for housing costs.

The OECD has warned that housing affordability can reduce worker and student mobility. Someone may reject a better job in Dublin, Cork or Galway if the additional salary is consumed by rent or a long commute. Businesses can then face labour shortages even while suitable workers exist elsewhere in the country.

Housing also affects public expenditure. The State must respond to social-housing demand, homelessness, rental support and infrastructure requirements at the same time as it tries to accelerate private construction. High market prices can increase the cost of acquiring land and homes for public purposes, further connecting the private housing shortage with the public finances.

The Government Is Now Targeting a Much Larger Housing System

The current national housing plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities 2025–2030, targets the delivery of 300,000 homes by the end of 2030. It includes targets for 72,000 social homes and 90,000 affordable housing supports, alongside substantial infrastructure and regulatory measures.

The scale matters. Delivering 300,000 homes over the period would require an average rate far above the 30,147 completions recorded in 2024 and above the 36,284 completed in 2025. It therefore represents not a continuation of current output but an intended expansion of Ireland’s housing-production capacity.

The plan is backed by large commitments to housing, water and wider infrastructure, including the €1 billion Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund. Planning reform, zoning, utility investment, apartment viability and construction-sector productivity are also intended to contribute.

Targets, however, are not homes. Their significance will depend on whether annual completions actually rise and remain elevated. Ireland’s experience shows that announcing land, finance or planning reforms individually is not enough if other parts of the development chain remain constrained.

What Happens Next Depends on Whether Supply Can Finally Outrun New Demand

The future of affordability can be understood through three broad scenarios. They are not forecasts with predetermined outcomes; they illustrate how the same housing market could develop under different supply and demand conditions.

The most plausible gradual-adjustment scenario: construction continues increasing over the remainder of the decade, infrastructure investment begins unlocking more serviced land and planning becomes more predictable, but delivery takes time to reach the scale required. Under this path, the existing shortage remains significant for several years. House prices may continue rising, but the pace could moderate if supply growth increasingly matches household formation. Affordability improves slowly through a combination of more homes and rising incomes rather than through a sudden fall in nominal property values.

The stronger-supply scenario: Ireland succeeds in moving annual output towards the upper range of estimated structural need and sustains it there, while also delivering enough homes to reduce pent-up demand. Apartment construction accelerates, infrastructure bottlenecks ease and productivity improves. If housing supply grows consistently faster than new demand, buyers gain more choice, bidding pressure reduces and house-price growth could remain below income growth for a prolonged period. This would produce a genuine improvement in affordability.

The adverse scenario: construction remains volatile, apartment viability weakens, infrastructure projects are delayed and development costs stay high while household demand continues growing. In that case, the housing deficit persists or widens. Prices and rents could continue rising faster than incomes in high-demand regions, pushing ownership later in life and increasing pressure on government housing supports.

External economic developments could alter any of these paths. A severe recession would weaken demand, while unexpectedly strong economic growth could intensify it. Migration can rise or fall. Interest rates can change. The essential structural variable nevertheless remains whether the number and type of homes delivered can keep pace with the number of households seeking them.

The Most Likely Improvement Will Be Slow Rather Than Dramatic

There are reasons for cautious optimism. Housing output is far above the extraordinarily low levels recorded after the financial crisis. The State is committing substantial resources to infrastructure, social housing and housing activation. The planning system is being reformed, and the scale of the shortage is now widely recognised across government, regulators and economic institutions.

There are equally strong reasons not to expect a quick return to cheap housing. Construction capacity cannot be multiplied overnight. Water networks and transport projects take years. Skilled labour must be trained or recruited. Large apartment schemes require substantial capital and long development periods. Meanwhile, population growth and household formation continue.

The arithmetic therefore points towards a prolonged adjustment rather than a simple turning point. Even reaching annual construction equal to estimated new structural demand would not immediately eliminate the accumulated deficit. Output would need to exceed newly arising demand for a sustained period before the backlog materially shrank.

Ireland’s Housing Crisis Is Ultimately a Capacity Crisis

The central lesson is that Ireland’s housing problem cannot be understood solely through incomes. High salaries allow households to spend more, but they do not automatically produce more land with sewers, more apartments near public transport or more construction workers. When productive housing capacity is slow to expand, additional purchasing power can instead increase the price of the existing stock.

Nor can the problem be reduced to population growth, planning, developers, banks, landlords or government policy in isolation. The post-2008 collapse removed construction capacity. The economic recovery restored demand. Population and household formation increased it further. Development costs, infrastructure shortages and planning uncertainty limited the speed of supply, while high rents made it harder for prospective buyers to accumulate savings.

For first-time buyers, these forces converge at the same moment. The deposit has become larger, the mortgage required has increased, lending rules limit leverage and rent absorbs part of the income from which savings must be made. Established owners may meanwhile carry substantial equity accumulated through previous house-price increases.

That is why the answer to Ireland’s affordability crisis is unlikely to be found in one dramatic intervention. More mortgage credit without more houses risks raising purchasing power against scarcity. Grants without supply face the same limitation. Planning permission without infrastructure does not create a habitable home, and infrastructure without viable construction does not guarantee delivery.

The durable route is more difficult but clearer: Ireland must build enough homes, of the right types and in the right places, for long enough that housing supply begins to overtake the growth in demand and reduce the accumulated shortage. If that happens while incomes continue rising, affordability can gradually recover. If it does not, even a wealthy country with high salaries can remain a country in which owning an ordinary home is beyond the reach of an increasing share of ordinary workers.