The government’s new housing plan is the latest chapter in the same old story of proposals that miss the point on what needs to be done to solve the crisis. Even after years of setting and failing to reach targets, prioritising the wants of the private market, and ignoring the evident need for the mass construction of public housing, the penny still hasn’t dropped that fundamental change is needed.

Firstly, it is no secret that the government is failing to deliver on the number of homes needed to tackle the housing crisis in the most general sense. The current shortfall between what is necessary and what has been delivered casts serious doubt on the ability of the government to deliver 300,000 homes overall before 2030.

In 2024, there was a decrease of 6.7% in terms of homes built compared to 2023, according to the Central Statistics Office, falling from 32,695 to 30,330. This is well below the ballpark figure of 50,000 homes that the Housing Commission and Central Bank say need to be delivered annually. Although this latest plan does target the equivalent of that figure between now and 2030, this still likely falls short when you consider the backlog that exists owing to the government’s ongoing failure to deliver on housing. Given this previous record on delivery, and the lack of any fundamental change in policy, it is difficult to believe that this time will somehow be any different.

Additionally, the government has decided to actually forgo annual targets with their latest plan, a convenient excuse should they fail to deliver in a given year. Do they really expect us to believe that, if the statistics show that they’ve fallen short of their own inadequate targets again in 2025 or 2026, they will not only reach but exceed them in 2027 or 2028?

In the previous housing plan, inappropriately named Housing For All, the government failed to meet their social housing targets of 9,300 homes for 2024, only reaching 7,871. As the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) points out, although this figure has been increased to 12,000 per year in the latest plan, it is widely recognised that the number needed is likely higher again at 20,000, while a previous report from the Simon Communities of Ireland, targeted at ending homelessness by 2030, recognised 15,000 social housing units per year as necessary. Again, not only are the targets here below what is needed, but going off of their previous record, it is difficult to imagine that the government will even reach their own targets in social housing.

Any talk on affordable housing, which features in the plan, is a red herring while the prices remain so out of reach for so many working people. Some of the affordable housing units in O’Devaney Gardens, for example, will cost in the region of half a million euro. The minimum salary needed to meet the criteria for even the one-bedroom apartments is €56,000, which is actually more than the average annual salary in Dublin. In what world is any of this actually affordable? So-called affordable housing is effectively just another way for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to continue to funnel public money into the hands of private developers. This is money that could be spent on the state more seriously building up its own housing stock as an alternative to the chaotic private market.

Despite their attempts to spin it otherwise, the government’s latest plan is the same old tired story on housing. It is effectively an acceptance of the status quo that is the housing crisis: working people will continue to suffer, while landlords and private developers will continue to profit. A radical shift is needed. The state itself needs to take the lead on housing, by committing to the mass construction of mixed-income, universally-accessible, publicly-owned housing. This would offer a public solution to the problems of the private market.