The Housing Minister says we need to be realistic about how much new housing can be built in 2021.
A new housing plan is due to be announced next year. The minister, Darragh O'Brien, says delivering 50,000 public homes is on his to-do list and is badly needed throughout the country.
“I’ve commissioned research from the ESRI which shows that we need to be delivering about 33,000 homes per annum. This year it’ll be probably around 20,000 public and private,” Mr O’Brien said. “It shows the scale of the challenge to do that. We’re in a better space to do it, but we need to build up capacity.” He also said we need to be realistic about how many homes we can build in any given year.
Some of the ESRI research published earlier this month examined the likely growth of the population based on assumptions about future trends in mortality, fertility and net migration.
Life expectancy is expected to improve from 79.3 years to 83.3 years for men and from 84.3 to 87.1 years for women over the projection horizon. The total fertility rate is projected to decline from its current rate of 1.8 to 1.6 by 2031 and remain constant thereafter. Net immigration over the medium term is expected to be over 15,000 per year in a ‘business as usual’ scenario.
At a national level in the ‘business as usual’ scenario, the population is expected to increase by around 926,000 people between 2016 and 2040 resulting in a total population of over 5.665 million people by the end of the period, amounting to an annual average growth rate of 0.7 per cent.
.
