The Central Bank of Ireland has raised doubts over whether the Government will achieve its target of building 300,000 new homes by 2030.
In its latest quarterly bulletin, the regulator forecast housing completions would reach 33,500 this year before rising to 37,000, 40,500 and 44,500 in 2026, 2027 and 2028 respectively.
“The sum over those years, including this year, would be about 155,000 ... that would make it challenging that in the last two years you would produce the same again,” the Central Bank’s director of economics and statistics Robert Kelly said.
The Government’s new housing plan promises that a minimum of 300,000 new homes will be built by 2030 but a sharp slowdown in commencements has placed a question mark over that target.
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The Central Bank said its housing forecasts were conditional on the Government’s revised National Development Plan delivering new infrastructure “that relieves current binding constraints in energy, water and wastewater”.
The forecasts also assumed that current bottlenecks around planning and the availability of zoned land are addressed.
“If it was a case that we get more [housing] enablers coming at the same time, that action plan meets all its targets, and we start unlocking it quicker, it could be the case there’s some upside in those numbers,” Mr Kelly said.
“But our central expectation is we’ll have about 155,000 units by the end of 2028.”
In its wider assessment of the economy, the Central Bank said the Irish economy had performed better than expected in 2025 and had showed “resilience” in the face of headwinds from US tariffs and wider trade uncertainty.
It said it expected growth in terms of modified domestic demand (MDD), a measure that attempts to strip out the distorting effect of multinationals, to be close to 4 per cent this year.
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The stronger growth was down to continued “positive momentum” in multinational investment and lower tariff uncertainty.
However, it warned that the rapid growth in employment and incomes that has underpinned consumer spending since 2021 would moderate from here on in, “feeding into a lower projected pace of growth”.
Headline growth (in MDD terms) is expected to average 2.9 per cent between 2026 and 2028.
A cooler labour market is also expected to see employment growth easing to below 2 per cent during the period, while the unemployment rate is expected to average 5 per cent with average wage growth easing back from 4.6 per cent this year to 3.5 per cent in 2028.
The regulator also noted that the outlook was for “slightly higher overall inflation” on the back of services price growth, which has “settled into a persistently higher phase post‑Covid, at around 3 per cent”.
Overall inflation is expected to average 2 per cent per annum out to 2028.
“Despite the notable challenges the Irish economy has faced this year it has shown resilience throughout 2025,” Mr Kelly said.
“The outlook for the Irish economy in the medium term is being shaped by differing sectoral performances, ongoing structural change, geopolitical tensions and policy actions both at home and abroad.
“Multinational sectors that predominantly export are adapting to a changing international environment for trade and investment, and so far that adjustment has been relatively benign for Ireland.
“Domestic activity signals are more mixed, with data pointing to a slower pace of growth and higher inflation,” he said.
