Local authorities are responsible for the provision and management of local authority – or council – housing, but they face many obstacles. Many of these are Government-inflicted: critical staff shortages, changing standards, policy flip-flopping, multiple uncertain funding streams, and micromanagement from civil servants and regulators.
Somewhat egregiously, politicians regularly object to new housing too. When he was a new TD, now-Tánaiste Simon Harris objected to housing for the homeless. In 2017, leader of Fianna Fáil and now Taoiseach Micheál Martin objected to plans for a student housing development in his constituency – as did Sinn Féin’s Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire and Fine Gael senator Jerry Buttimer.
On top of all that is the issue of finance to manage the country’s 150,224 council houses.
In 2023, the latest figures available, councils spent €223,128,103 on housing maintenance. In many councils, particularly urban ones, rental income from tenants is not nearly enough to cover their maintenance outgoings. Although Dublin City Council had a rental income of €110 million in 2024 from its 26,364 houses, its maintenance costs were €180 million in the same year.
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It varies across councils, but rent is often about 15 per cent of the tenant’s income, with a small additional sum per extra person in the household. The average Dublin City Council rent is €77 a week; however, just 70 per cent of Dublin City Council tenants are compliant in paying rent, and we don’t know why. Some 470 tenants are in serious arrears owing more than €11,000 each and another 234 owe more than €19,000 each.
In 2022, councils across Ireland were owed €105 million in unpaid rents. Dublin City Council topped the list at €38 million. Although councils’ staff chase arrears, there is not enough of them to chase €105 million.
Many council executives and the politically-ignored Housing Commission feel the model needs to change so that tenants pay enough to cover maintenance costs, with higher earning households paying more rent, and subsidies for lower earners. Dublin City Council will vote on narrowing the rent-versus-expenditure gap soon, which may well expose political differences across parties, as Gerard Howlin wrote recently in these pages.
Council tenants are also legally entitled to buy their houses under certain conditions, such as if they have been getting social housing support for 10 years and have an income of at least €11,000 annually. Purchasers can get a discount of 40 to 60 per cent off the purchase price, which will be clawed back at 2 per cent per year if the house is sold. A tenant getting a 40 per cent discount will therefore be able to sell their house at full market value, owing nothing to the council after 20 years.
Over the last century, the State has sold off two-thirds of all the council housing it has built, including 476 in 2023. The sale of these houses has created solid and stable homeowning communities and allowed families to stay close to each other, increasingly important, for example, as grandparents become default minders of grandchildren when after-school facilities are expensive and over-subscribed.
The kicker is that councils never get enough money from the sales to replace the housing sold, making it harder to increase the stock of council housing.
Figures from the Department of Housing show that last year local authorities’ total “new-build” housing output was 3,001. Highest-output councils were Meath (266), Dublin City (256) and Cork City (247). Lowest-output councils were Sligo (16), Leitrim (13) and Kerry (11).
However, an average of 97 “new-build” houses per council pales beside the average social housing waiting list of 1,933 per council. Approved Housing Bodies (AHB) also contribute “new-build” housing, about 3,900 in 2024, mostly in urban areas.
The Department of Housing’s definition of new-build is loose, however. It doesn’t mean, as you might reasonably think, that a new house has been built by the council; it means a house is newly built, but not necessarily by the council, or AHB. The 3,001 “new-build” council houses cover various types, including turnkeys.
A turnkey is a walk-in-ready new housing unit usually delivered by the forward-funding of developments, or the purchase of newly completed developments by councils or AHBs before they come to the market. Turnkeys are effectively purchases. In 2024, more than 40 per cent of all so-called new-build council housing was delivered by turnkey. For AHBs, this figure was closer to 90 per cent. Since 2016, councils are building more housing directly, and AHBs increasingly using turnkeys.
What does it matter? Well, as David McWilliams pointed out in this newspaper recently and I have highlighted previously, it matters because “it turns out the state is buying the lion’s share of all new housing”. Not only is the State guaranteeing the income stream of private sector builders by purchasing expensive housing, it is also competing with purchasers seeking to buy their first home or to move. The argument that the turnkey housing would not have been built had it not been bought by the State is unprovable.
This level of State activity is part of the reason why each year a smaller proportion of all new housing is coming to the market available for the general public to buy. Last year, it was less than 30 per cent. And this is before we consider the second-hand houses that local authorities are also buying, often former council houses. Minister James Browne recently said that 7,000 second-hand homes have been acquired since 2020 at a cost of €7 billion. Although some of these will have been bought under the tenant-in-situ scheme to keep families in their home who would otherwise have been made homeless (a good scheme for which funding now appears uncertain), councils are still competing with the general public.
Obviously many councils could do a lot better, and it is right to critique and hold them to account, but context is also important: in trying to carry out its functions for the State, councils are often hobbled by the State itself. The policy and practice of delivering and managing local authority housing could do with a serious review or officials could dust off the Housing Commission’s recommendations.
Dr Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin
