PIECE 02HousingLiving document
The question
Longford added 8.5 people for every home it finished and left 12.1% of its houses empty. Dublin added 2.3 and left 5.5% empty — and Dublin took in 29% of the country's population growth.
The county that received the fewest people is the county that housed them worst. That is the whole finding, and the rest of this page is the working.
People added to Ireland for every home completed between the last two censuses. A household needs about two.
Longford against Dublin on that same measure. Why is the pressure worst where fewest people went?
Your voice — 180 words, at the top
One town you keep coming back to, and what changed between two visits. Someone named, with permission, who left it and where they went.
One · The arithmeticwhat is true
Between the last two censuses Ireland gained 361,671 people and completed 133,262 homes. That is 2.71 people for every home finished.
The houses would be there if they hadn't come.
A missing denominator. The claim counts arrivals and never counts what was built beside them. Put the two numbers together, let the counties sort themselves, and the ranking comes out backwards.
361,671
more people living in Ireland, Census 2016 to Census 2022
CSO Census of Population
133,262
new homes completed over the same six years
CSO New Dwelling Completions
2.71
people added for every home built
Derived
212.5k–256k
homes Ireland was already short by at the 2022 Census
Housing Commission, 2024
↳235,000 is the Housing Commission's own rounded midpoint of that range, not a point estimate. We will keep saying so every time we print it.
Those four numbers are the whole of the arithmetic. The constraint is the build rate — and the clearest proof of that is not a map. It is fifteen years of two series, one set above the other.
Fifteen years, in order
Scroll through the two series together. The chart is complete before the first step; the steps only point at parts of it.
CSO New Dwelling Completions (annual) and CSO Population and Migration Estimates, year to April, 2011–2025. Method notes under “About the data”.
01
Ireland finished 4,575 homes in 2013. The country had about 4.6 million people in it. Whole years of the early 2010s produced fewer new dwellings than a single good quarter does now.
This is the hole everything else falls into.
02
Net migration was negative every year from 2010 to 2014. Ireland lost people for five straight years — mostly young Irish people, mostly to Australia, Canada and Britain.
The deficit the Housing Commission measured in 2022 was accumulating through those years, when immigration was not merely low but negative. Whatever built the shortfall, it was not arrivals.
03
From 2015 completions climb steadily and migration turns positive again. By 2025 Ireland completed 36,284 homes — the highest in the published series, and a real achievement that mostly goes unmentioned.
Net migration peaked at +79,300 in the year to April 2024.
04
Across the census period the country added 361,671 people and built 133,262 homes. At the record 2025 rate, clearing the 212,500–256,000 backlog on top of new household formation is a decade of work that has not started.
The argument about who is arriving is an argument about the second-order term.
| Year | Homes completed | Immigrants (thousands) | Emigrants (thousands) | Net migration (thousands) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 6,994 | 53.3 | 80.6 | -27.4 |
| 2012 | 4,911 | 57.3 | 83.0 | -25.7 |
| 2013 | 4,575 | 62.7 | 81.3 | -18.7 |
| 2014 | 5,518 | 66.5 | 75.0 | -8.5 |
| 2015 | 7,219 | 75.9 | 70.0 | 5.9 |
| 2016 | 9,720 | 82.3 | 66.2 | 16.2 |
| 2017 | 14,218 | 95.3 | 56.1 | 39.2 |
| 2018 | 17,777 | 96.0 | 51.6 | 44.4 |
| 2019 | 21,012 | 97.1 | 53.1 | 44.0 |
| 2020 | 20,483 | 95.6 | 50.9 | 44.7 |
| 2021 | 20,443 | 74.1 | 52.3 | 21.8 |
| 2022 | 29,609 | 107.8 | 56.1 | 51.7 |
| 2023 | 32,463 | 141.6 | 64.0 | 77.7 |
| 2024 | 30,124 | 149.2 | 69.9 | 79.3 |
| 2025 | 36,215 | 125.3 | 65.6 | 59.7 |
CSO New Dwelling Completions (annual) and CSO Population and Migration Estimates, year to April. Completions are the CSO API series the chart is drawn from, which returns 36,215 for 2025; the published Quarter 4 2025 release gives 36,284, and the prose uses that. Migration is in thousands of people; a negative net figure is net emigration.
Download CSVThe year the building stopped
4,575
New homes completed in 2013, in a country of 4.6 million people, during the fifth consecutive year of net emigration.
CSO New Dwelling Completions. For scale: the 2025 figure is eight times that, and still short of what the Housing Commission says is needed.
Two · Where it is worstand where the people went
They do not. Hover or tap any county and both maps highlight together, so you can read one county on both measures at once.
How to read thisTwo maps of the same 26 counties. On the first, stronger colour means more people arrived per home built; on the second, stronger colour means more houses were empty. If arrivals were the problem the two would be opposites. Point at any county to fill the panel underneath.
Measure one
People added per home built
Measure two
Homes empty on census night
Pick a county
Hover, tap or tab to any county on either map. This panel fills with that county's full record: population change, homes built, vacancy, build rate per thousand people, and where it ranks against the other twenty-five.
Click to lock a county so you can read it properly. Escape clears it.
First map: CSO Census 2016 and 2022 with CSO New Dwelling Completions by county. Second: CSO Census 2022, occupancy status.
| County | Population 2022 | People added 2016–22 | Homes completed | People per home | Rank, people per home | Vacancy rate (%) | Rank, vacancy rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Longford | 46,634 | 5,761 | 679 | 8.48 | 1 | 12.1 | 4 |
| Leitrim | 35,087 | 3,043 | 423 | 7.19 | 2 | 15.5 | 1 |
| Roscommon | 69,995 | 5,451 | 1,025 | 5.32 | 3 | 13.4 | 2 |
| Westmeath | 95,840 | 7,070 | 1,578 | 4.48 | 4 | 8.3 | 13 |
| Tipperary | 167,661 | 8,108 | 1,861 | 4.36 | 5 | 9.0 | 12 |
| Sligo | 69,819 | 4,284 | 1,018 | 4.21 | 6 | 11.8 | 6 |
| Cavan | 81,201 | 5,025 | 1,220 | 4.12 | 7 | 11.8 | 5 |
| Carlow | 61,931 | 4,999 | 1,285 | 3.89 | 8 | 7.2 | 19 |
| Waterford | 127,085 | 10,909 | 2,881 | 3.79 | 9 | 7.1 | 20 |
| Laois | 91,657 | 6,960 | 1,928 | 3.61 | 10 | 7.6 | 17 |
| Wexford | 163,527 | 13,805 | 3,937 | 3.51 | 11 | 7.5 | 18 |
| Clare | 127,419 | 8,602 | 2,457 | 3.50 | 12 | 9.2 | 11 |
| Offaly | 82,668 | 4,707 | 1,402 | 3.36 | 13 | 8.3 | 14 |
| Galway | 276,451 | 18,393 | 6,240 | 2.95 | 14 | 10.1 | 10 |
| Limerick | 205,444 | 10,545 | 3,653 | 2.89 | 15 | 7.7 | 15 |
| Cork | 581,231 | 38,363 | 13,910 | 2.76 | 16 | 7.1 | 21 |
| Mayo | 137,231 | 6,724 | 2,468 | 2.72 | 17 | 13.3 | 3 |
| Meath | 220,296 | 25,252 | 9,461 | 2.67 | 18 | 5.8 | 24 |
| Louth | 139,100 | 10,216 | 3,904 | 2.62 | 19 | 6.7 | 22 |
| Kerry | 155,258 | 7,551 | 3,001 | 2.52 | 20 | 11.4 | 8 |
| Monaghan | 64,832 | 3,446 | 1,394 | 2.47 | 21 | 10.8 | 9 |
| Dublin | 1,450,701 | 103,342 | 45,442 | 2.27 | 22 | 5.5 | 25 |
| Kilkenny | 103,685 | 4,453 | 1,983 | 2.25 | 23 | 7.7 | 16 |
| Wicklow | 155,485 | 13,060 | 5,852 | 2.23 | 24 | 5.8 | 23 |
| Donegal | 166,321 | 7,129 | 3,206 | 2.22 | 25 | 11.4 | 7 |
| Kildare | 246,977 | 24,473 | 11,054 | 2.21 | 26 | 5.3 | 26 |
CSO Census 2016 and 2022 (population and occupancy status) with CSO New Dwelling Completions by county. People per home is people added divided by homes completed over the same six years. Ranks are out of 26, sorted here worst first: 1 is the most people added per home built, and 1 on the vacancy rank is the highest share of homes empty on census night.
Download CSVThe same counties sit at the top of both scales. Longford, Leitrim, Roscommon and Sligo are worst on both. Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow — where almost half the population growth landed — are at the bottom of both.
Longford added 8.5 people for every home it finished and left 12.1% of its housing empty. Dublin added 2.3 and left 5.5% empty. Dublin absorbed 29% of the country's population growth and did the best job of housing it.
Whatever is going wrong, it is not being driven by where people went.
If too many people were chasing a fixed stock, the counties under most pressure would be the counties with least slack. The correlation would be negative. Put every county on one chart and see which way the cloud leans.
How to read thisEach dot is a county — rust for Longford, Leitrim and Roscommon, green for Dublin and the commuter belt. Further right means more empty houses; further up means more people arrived per home built. The dots slope upwards, which is the opposite of what the popular explanation predicts.
Same two measures as the maps above, one dot per county. Dashed line is the least-squares fit.
| County | Vacancy rate (%) | People per home |
|---|---|---|
| Leitrim | 15.5 | 7.19 |
| Roscommon | 13.4 | 5.32 |
| Mayo | 13.3 | 2.72 |
| Longford | 12.1 | 8.48 |
| Cavan | 11.8 | 4.12 |
| Sligo | 11.8 | 4.21 |
| Donegal | 11.4 | 2.22 |
| Kerry | 11.4 | 2.52 |
| Monaghan | 10.8 | 2.47 |
| Galway | 10.1 | 2.95 |
| Clare | 9.2 | 3.50 |
| Tipperary | 9.0 | 4.36 |
| Westmeath | 8.3 | 4.48 |
| Offaly | 8.3 | 3.36 |
| Limerick | 7.7 | 2.89 |
| Kilkenny | 7.7 | 2.25 |
| Laois | 7.6 | 3.61 |
| Wexford | 7.5 | 3.51 |
| Carlow | 7.2 | 3.89 |
| Waterford | 7.1 | 3.79 |
| Cork | 7.1 | 2.76 |
| Louth | 6.7 | 2.62 |
| Wicklow | 5.8 | 2.23 |
| Meath | 5.8 | 2.67 |
| Dublin | 5.5 | 2.27 |
| Kildare | 5.3 | 2.21 |
One dot per county, ordered here by vacancy rate. Same two measures as the maps above; the dashed line on the chart is the least-squares fit through these 26 points and the correlation is +0.56.
Download CSVThe correlation is +0.56. Counties with more empty houses also had more people added per home built. That is what you see when houses sit where people are not moving to, and are not built where they are.
↳Correlation is not cause, and the third variable is obvious: both measures track distance from a city. That is the finding, not a confound — and the next chapter is about what it means.
Three · Three crises, one policythe finding that reframes it
The ratio gets worse and the empty houses get more common the further you go from a city. The same national target is written for all of it.
Sort the twenty-six counties into three groups and the two measures separate cleanly. The further you get from a city, the more people arrived for every home finished — and the more of the housing stock was standing empty.
Dublin and its commuter belt have almost no slack at all. GeoDirectory put Dublin's residential vacancy rate at 1.2% in December 2025 — the lowest in the country and below any reasonable estimate of the frictional floor. Nothing there is empty. It is a pure supply problem and it shows up as a price.
Leitrim, in the same report, was 11.7%. That is not the same problem wearing a different hat. It is housing that exists in places where the work, the transport and the school places do not.
CSO Census 2016 and 2022; CSO New Dwelling Completions. Groupings are ours and are listed in full under "About the data".
| Group | People per home built | Empty homes per 1,000 people | People added 2016–22 | Homes completed | Homes empty on census night | Population 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dublin and the commuter belt | 2.31 | 21 | 166,127 | 71,809 | 44,238 | 2,073,459 |
| Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford | 2.93 | 33 | 78,210 | 26,684 | 39,847 | 1,190,211 |
| Everywhere else | 3.37 | 44 | 117,334 | 34,769 | 82,667 | 1,859,866 |
| All 26 counties | 2.71 | 33 | 361,671 | 133,262 | 166,752 | 5,123,536 |
CSO Census 2016 and 2022; CSO New Dwelling Completions. The groupings are ours and are listed county by county under “About the data”. The two right-hand measures are the two columns of the chart; the counts they are worked out from are printed beside them.
Download CSVOne national target hides both, and a policy calibrated for the average of the two fixes neither.
What people say
“I won't be the one to sell the old house”
John Gerard Reynolds, 74, Gortletteragh, Co Leitrim
Irish Times, 6 February 2023
What the data says
This is the mechanism
1 in 3
Of applications to the vacant property refurbishment grant have actually been paid out: 16,607 applications, 12,096 approved, about 5,330 paid on completion of works since the 2022 launch.
Rural vacancy is not a warehouse of spare homes waiting to be released. It is inheritance, sentiment, probate, and buildings that are expensive to make habitable. A grant scheme meets all four and loses two thirds of its applicants on the way through.
Department of Housing figures via Irish Times, 26 January 2026, and Agriland, 16 June 2026. In the same article an estate agent in Carrick-on-Shannon asks whether a roofless cottage halfway up a mountain counts as a dwelling — which is a fair question about the statistic.
Largely correct, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A vacant cottage in north Leitrim does not house a nurse in Dublin 8. Anyone arguing from the raw national vacancy count — "we have 80,000 empty homes" — is making a weaker case than they think, because the national rate has fallen to 3.7%, a record low and close to what normal turnover alone would produce.
What the rural numbers do establish is narrower and still fatal to the claim this piece tests: the counties under most population pressure relative to building are not the counties receiving most people.
Four · What is actually stopping itso what
Four things stand between a permission and a house. They get harder in order, and the last one is a ceiling nobody voted for.
Step 01 of 04
In 2025 Ireland granted planning permission for 34,974 dwelling units and received 16,412 commencement notices. Permission is not the binding constraint at the top of the pipe.
How to read thisFour separate annual totals, drawn to one scale. They are not stages of a single cohort — a home completed in 2025 was commenced in 2023 or earlier — so the bars are not meant to subtract. It is the levels that carry the argument.
CSO Planning Permissions, Year 2025; Department of Housing commencement notices; CSO New Dwelling Completions, Q4 2025. Release dates in “Sources, in full”.
| Stage | Dwelling units |
|---|---|
| Granted planning permission, 2025 | 34,974 |
| Commencement notices, 2025 | 16,412 |
| Homes completed, 2025 | 36,284 |
| Commencement notices, 2024 — for context | 69,311 |
CSO Planning Permissions, Year 2025; Department of Housing commencement notices; CSO New Dwelling Completions, Quarter 4 2025. Four separate annual totals, not stages of one cohort: they are not meant to subtract.
Download CSVThe 2024 commencement figure of 69,311 is not a construction boom — it is a deadline. The development levy waiver and the Uisce Éireann connection rebate were expiring, so notices were filed early. Anyone quoting 2025 as a 76% collapse without saying that is misleading you, and anyone quoting 2024 as a record is doing the same thing in the other direction.
Step 02 of 04
What people say
“There's no roofers, no plasterers, no block layers.”
Mark Sharkey, chief executive, Templecrone Co-operative Society, Co Donegal
Irish Times, 28 May 2025. He had “a dozen rooves ready to go” and nobody to put them up.
What the data says
Confirmed, and it closes the loop
90%+
Of Hardware Association Ireland members say building projects are being postponed or abandoned because of a shortage of tradespeople.
76.7% of construction-sector employees in Ireland are Irish nationals, which means just over one in five are not. The labour you would remove is the labour that builds the houses.
Martin Markey, Hardware Association Ireland, Irish Times, 28 May 2025. Workforce share: CSO Business in Ireland 2025, Labour Market and Social Sustainability, Table 2.4, released 19 May 2026 — the measure covers employees only and excludes the self-employed, who are numerous in construction, so it is likely an undercount.
Step 03 of 04
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's name for it: a project is asked to satisfy so many individually defensible goals that satisfying all of them at once makes it undeliverable. Nobody voted for "no housing". Everyone voted for one more reasonable condition. Here is one scheme's worth of reasonable conditions.
Illustrative, not exhaustive, and deliberately not costed — because nobody has costed it. That is the point of the section.
| Condition a scheme must satisfy |
|---|
| A — Design standards — minimum room sizes, dual aspect, ceiling heights |
| B — Parking minimums, even where there is a train |
| C — Part V social and affordable provision |
| D — Development contributions to the local authority |
| E — Water and wastewater connection capacity and charges |
| F — Apprenticeship and procurement conditions |
| G — Environmental assessment and habitats screening |
| H — Statutory consultation, then appeal, then judicial review |
Illustrative, not exhaustive, and deliberately not costed — nobody has costed the full set, which is the point of the section. There is no number column here because there is no published number to put in one.
Download CSVAsk whether each requirement is reasonable and the answer is always yes. Ask whether the thing gets built and the answer is no.
The same logic runs through the incentives. A landlord holding a vacant property in a county where the derelict sites levy is not collected pays nothing for holding it, and the asset appreciates. Sitting on it is correct. A homeowner whose single largest asset is their house has a direct financial interest in there being fewer houses. Objecting is correct. A council that has not built at scale since the 1970s has no standing team and no institutional memory. Outsourcing is correct.
Three rational actors, one terrible outcome, no villain to sack.
The Derelict Sites Levy is charged at 7% of market value. Reporting of departmental returns for 2023 indicates roughly €604,621 was collected against about €5.6m levied, with 17 of 31 local authorities collecting nothing at all — including six of the eight counties with the highest vacancy rates. We have not verified these against the departmental returns ourselves; an FOI request is outstanding.
Step 04 of 04
Uisce Éireann's chairman told an architects' conference in March 2025 that its €10.3 billion investment programme for 2025–2029 is sized for roughly 33,000 housing units a year. The government target is 300,000 homes by 2030.
The Ringsend treatment plant is projected to reach capacity around 2028. Its replacement, the Greater Dublin Drainage scheme, has been in planning since 2018, has gone from an estimated €630–650 million to €1.3 billion, and is now expected to finish in 2032.
What people say
“you wouldn't get planning permission for new houses in Carrigallen because the treatment plant is at capacity”
Cllr Paddy O'Rourke, Leitrim County Council
Leitrim Observer, 23 July 2026
What the data says
The empty county is also a blocked county
33,000
Housing units a year is what Uisce Éireann's €10.3bn 2025–2029 programme is sized to serve, against a target of 300,000 homes by 2030.
The county with the highest vacancy rate in Ireland cannot get permission to build in one of its towns. Both facts are true at once, and only one of them ever gets quoted.
Jerry Grant, chair of Uisce Éireann, RIAI conference, reported by RTÉ, 28 March 2025.
This is the hardest constraint in the piece and the least discussed. You cannot consult your way past it, you cannot deregulate it, and it takes fourteen years.
The ceiling nobody voted for
33,000
Homes a year. That is what Ireland's water and wastewater investment programme is sized to serve, against a national target of 300,000 by 2030.
Jerry Grant, chair of Uisce Éireann, RIAI conference, March 2025. No published figure exists for how many homes are currently blocked by water capacity. We looked.
Five · What would move itnow what
Not a manifesto. Four things whose effect could be checked by anyone, including us, and which we would then have to report on whether or not they worked.
None of them is about who is allowed to come here. That is not squeamishness — it is that the arithmetic in chapter one leaves nothing for an arrivals policy to do. The building rate is the variable.
Counties are the 26 of the Republic. The map is built from CSO Electoral Division boundaries, simplified with Ramer–Douglas–Peucker and projected from Irish Transverse Mercator to an SVG viewbox.
Groupings are ours. Dublin and the commuter belt: Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Wicklow. Cities: Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford. Everywhere else: the remaining eighteen counties.
What is excluded. Holiday homes are counted separately by the CSO and are not in the vacancy figure. The 2026 completions year is a part-year and is dropped from the chart. Northern Ireland is outside every series here.
The 2025 completions figure. The fifteen-year chart is drawn from the CSO API series, which returns 36,215 for 2025; the published Q4 2025 release gives 36,284. We use the published figure in prose and show the API value in the chart rather than quietly reconciling them.
Known limits. The census vacancy measure counts dwellings unoccupied on one night and will overstate long-term vacancy; the GeoDirectory address-point measure gives a lower national rate (3.7%) and we quote both rather than choosing. The derelict sites levy figures are secondary reporting and are flagged in the text.
Every CSO and Eurostat figure is pulled by a script in the public repository and cached with its request URL and fetch timestamp. If a number is wrong, the way to prove it is to run the script.
Quotes are reproduced from the named publication and date. Where a quotation could not be verified against its source twice, it is not printed here at all — there are several we left out for that reason.
How many homes in Ireland are currently blocked by water or wastewater capacity? No published figure exists. We have looked in the Uisce Éireann investment plan, in the Department of Housing outputs and in the planning statistics, and the number is not there.
Read next · Piece 03
Ardnacrusha took 17.3% of one year's state spending. Councils built at 2.77 homes per thousand people in 1975. The capacity was not lost; it was dismantled.
Read it →
In the pipeline
Local authority completions per 1,000 people since the 1930s, and the year the capacity left the building. Data pulled, analysis under way.
Coming