Gavan Reilly: How can the Government claim success with no targets to aim for?

The first thing to say about the latest housing stats is that, objectively, they are very good. 38,284 new units in the market means the country can house about 90,000 people more than a year ago. When supply has been so acutely short, that’s good news.

The government will take particular encouragement from the statistics about new apartments. The collapse in home-building in 2024 – about 30,000 units delivered, when the outgoing government had been re-elected claiming it would be 40,000 – was partly because of plummeting numbers of apartments. Last year about 12,000 new apartments were finished, up from 8,500 the year before.

The second thing to say about the housing stats is that the government has made them almost impossible to assess. Only two months ago, remember, they officially did away with any annual targets for housing completions – instead adopting a single six-year tally of 303,000 deliveries. After the general election was called they put forward changes to the National Planning Framework suggesting 41,000 homes would be expected this year. Once ensconced back in office, in April, they did away with that metric too.

To meet that overall six-year target, Ireland will need over 50,000 extra homes each year for the next five. Even allowing for averages, and trying to chart a sustainable path, we’ll need about 42,000 homes in 2026. As the fella said: a lot done, more to do.

This massaging of detail says a lot about Ireland’s present-day approach to governance. Micheál Martin loves to laud (and retweet) official statistics that present Ireland as an outlier in the world; a haven of prosperity, stability and high living standards. This is also objectively partly true, but also politically meaningless. Nothing annoys voters more than, say, a minister on a post-Budget radio phone-in telling us that social welfare rates in Ireland are much higher than in the North or Britain. You might as well compare Ireland’s performance to Bhutan or Bolivia – neither are relevant if the caller doesn’t live there.

Your columnist was surprised to read a claim, from the Department of Education last November, that there were almost 800 vacant places in special classes across Irish schools – a claim which runs contrary to the lived experience of many parents unable to find adequate places for their children with additional needs. The figures, the Department said, had been compiled by the National Council for Special Education (NCSE), based in Trim.

The disability services campaign FUSS were also surprised to see that claim, and duly lodged a Freedom of Information request to the NCSE asking to see the basis for the figures. The NCSE, having asked for extra time to process the request, told them that no such figures existed.

People are already cynical enough about the methods and motivations of modern politicians. That isn’t helped when the State seems to go out of its way to obfuscate reality.

It also, incidentally, highlights how important it is for modern governments to be good at ‘vibes’ – but that’s a column for another day.