The dust has settled on the final leaders’ debate of this year’s general election campaign, after Fine Gael’s Simon Harris, Fianna Fail’s Micheal Martin and Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald faced off on RTE’s PrimeTime programme on Tuesday night.
There were 90 minutes of claims and counter-claims, but one claim that featured was a suggestion by Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin that Ireland is now building more social homes than it has since the 1970s.
The claim has been repeated by Mr Martin and other ministers in recent years to defend the Government’s efforts to tackle the housing crisis – but is it actually true?
Evaluation
Housing figures for 2024 have not yet been finalised (because houses are still being built), so we have to use figures from last year to fully test this claim.
Official figures show that in 2023, the Government built 8,110 units of social housing, the highest number since 1975.
That year, local authorities built 8,794 social housing units, which is the highest number on record.
However, the Government’s success comes with two pieces of important context.
The State’s construction of social housing has been relatively low historically and gradually declined after that 1975 peak.
In the late 1970s, the State’s role in housing construction declined and voluntary and co-operative organisations began to make up for shortfalls instead.
The number of social housing units built by the Government was under 6,000 in each year between 1980 and 2000, and hovered between 6,000 and 6,500 units for most of the 2000s (with the exceptions of 2007 and 2008) before falling again after the financial crash.
At the same time, private developers began to build homes at increasing levels, a trend which continued through to the Celtic Tiger before the figure also fell off from 2007 onwards.
It should also be noted that while the Government built the second-highest number of social housing units on record in 2023, it has failed to meet its own social housing targets in each year since the Housing for All plan commenced in 2022.
In 2022, it built 7,433 social housing units in comparison to a target of 9,000 units; and in 2023, it built 8,110 units in comparison to a target of 9,100 units.
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