by Liam Hogan 
Is Housing Supply really meetin
According to the 2016 census Ireland has a population of 4.5 million people. That census also revealed that we have 1,636,000 households, or 2.75 people per household.
Since then, the population has grown to 5,050,150. Households have increased to 1.9 million and the average people per household has decreased to 2.65 per households.
Up to 2008, Ireland was very much in sync with other European countries but after the economic crash of 2008, the number of people per household in Ireland began to trend upwards which is understandable when you think about the consequences of that economic crash.
As the Irish economy recovers those people who could not buy a house in the last12 years will want to stop renting and buy their own home, and this is creating the demand which we are now experiencing. In other words, the number of Irish people per household will trend downwards to meet the European average of 2.2people per household.
Ernst and Young Economic in their recent Advisory Report said that there will be 25,000 housing units built this year, 27,000 in 2023, 32,000 homes in 2024.This is nowhere close to where we need to be if we plan to reach the European household average by 2030.
The population has been growing at 0.7% per year, so if we use this average, we can estimate that in 2030 the population of Ireland will be 5,332,958, an increase of 282,808 people over the next eight years.
Now if we use this estimated figure for the future, in order to meet the European average of 2.2 persons per household, we will need 524,072 houses to be built by then. That averages out at 65,509 properties per year that we need to build each year for the next 8 years in order to supply enough houses to meet the current demand.
Even if we assume that the population does not grow, and we say that in 2030 the population of Ireland stays at 5,050,150, in order to reach the European average of 2.2 persons per household, we would still need to build 395,522 housing units, which averages at 49,440 housing units per year.
As we can clearly see the plan that the Government has in place to fix our housing crisis will not be effective and we are way off where we need to be.
g demand? Nowhere close!
