Construction moratorium: an idea whose time has definitely arrived

Jude Sherry and Dr Frank O’Connor

he Housing Essay is a weekly deep dive from a rotating variety of voices into issues impacting the property crisis in Ireland. Are there potential solutions that may be currently overlooked or traditionally ignored by policymakers?

GIVEN THE SEVERITY of the ever worsening housing emergency, a moratorium to prioritise building homes over non-essential construction is the only way forward.

We all know that the shortage of construction labour, zoned and serviced lands, as
well as the limited capacity in our energy grid and water infrastructure is restricting
housing construction in Ireland. Precious resources are being wasted to construct
non-essential things, such as controversial data centres, offices that will just lie
empty and hotels that are soon converted to emergency accommodation.

Restricting new buildings to specified uses is not an uncommon practice.

When the societal need is great, and when vital resources are scarce, they should be prioritised to where they are most needed. This is why we called for a construction
moratorium in our opening statement to an Oireachtas committee last year.

De facto construction moratoriums are exactly what happened after World War II, when (as you can expect after a destructive war) there was a massive shortage of homes but also of labour and materials. Post-war, most European countries continued their war-time market control, set up initially to direct resources towards the war effort; post-war they redirected these resources to rebuild damaged infrastructure and build more homes.

In the UK, they made it difficult to get construction licences for new commerce or
retail buildings. In France they prioritised the allocation of steel and concrete to
infrastructure and residential projects.

The post-WWII lesson

While we don’t have post-war rebuilding requirements, we do have a massive shortage of homes that is risking European societal cohesion. See the rise of the far right in Germany and France and anti-immigration violence in the UK, the massive protests in Spain resulting in an early election, and Ireland losing so many of its educated youth to emigration in recent years.

The housing situation, and the fear and insecurity that goes with it, is getting bleaker.

Post-war European governments knew they couldn’t leave it to the market to responsibly allocate critical resources to where they were most needed. Have they forgotten this important economic lesson in 2026?

Like post-war Europe, we believe a targeted construction moratorium on non-essential buildings would be transformative in ensuring everyone in Ireland has a home. A moratorium would free up our limited labour, land, energy and water resources making them more accessible and more affordable for home builders, whether that’s for new homes or renovating existing vacant and derelict properties.

This suspension should initially be for three years and reviewed every six months to determine if an extension is warranted. All buildings currently under construction should be completed, but no new commencement notices and planning permission should be issued. Such a construction moratorium needs to be well researched and planned, focusing on the most resource intensive non-essential buildings.

The moratorium could include retail and services, given that we currently have lots of such buildings empty. It could also include banning construction of all second homes like they do in Switzerland. For this essay though, we make the case for an immediate moratorium on new data centres and offices.

Let’s begin with data centres

The case for a moratorium on data centres has got far stronger over the last few years. Not only has there been a significant outcry over the huge amount of energy being consumed by data centres, this summer their excessive use of water also emerged as a growing public concern.

What can get missed is that data centres are also using up limited labour and serviced land that should be used to provide more homes. Creating an opportunity cost of about 50,000 homes, according to a recent report co-authored by Patrick Bresnihan in Maynooth University.

Because of the growing objections to data centres, moratoriums on new and especially large AI specific data centres are becoming more common across the world. Whether it’s in the USA with the likes of New York state 10 enforcing a one-year ban or in Europe with Amsterdam banning all new data centres until 2030.

Although not national policy, there was a de facto moratorium on data centres in Dublin between 2021 and 2025. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities was forced to halt new grid connections for data centres because the rapid increase in demand risked triggering massive blackouts.

So, it is possible to do it.

Typically, other governments use a temporary pause on new data centres to evaluate their impacts on energy grids, water resources, housing targets and communities. Instead of using the last five years to undertake such an evaluation, the Irish government decided to bury its head in the sand. This was most recently demonstrated through their deliberate removal of these concerns from a €100k KPMG report about data centres.

Many lobby groups are also wilfully ignoring the impacts and opportunity costs associated with data centres and pushing for an industry wide ramp up, just like the Construction Industry Federation did at its annual conference last month. The USA has clearly chosen data centres over homes. Is this really the path Ireland is choosing to go down?

And now for offices

The case for a moratorium on new office construction has been strong since we started #DerelictIreland in 2020. This time it’s not because of the impact offices have (eg, excessive energy and water consumption), but simply because we have too many empty offices already. Dublin has the third highest amount of empty offices of European cities at 15% in Q1 2026, having just lost the top position at 17.2% at the end of Q3 2025.

Similarly, there are lots of new offices lying empty for years in Cork city, while many others have to be filled by public funded bodies, such as the new Passport Office, RTÉ and the NTA, that inevitably leave other offices empty. Another example is Cork City Council paying €34m for the Counting House (for its new library), a high price for a building that couldn’t find a tenant in the six years since it was redeveloped.

Cork city has 73.2sqm of empty offices space on the market, and nearly double that in the development pipeline. With demand still low, it’s unlikely many of these schemes will be built in the foreseeable future, which is resulting in many prime serviced sites lying idle for another five to 10 years.

This wasted land will often not be subject to the Residential Zoned Land Tax because of its historic planning for offices or hotels. Therefore, there is nothing to discourage owners from hoarding the land as long as they want. This is land that is continuously increasing in value; ironically, because there isn’t enough land on the market.

Residential over offices

In 2024, the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council advised local authorities to prioritise residential planning permissions over offices. A positive step, however, we need to go further and ensure any available land with public transport connections be reallocated for housing, especially on sites with planning for offices and where planning for commercial, retail and hospitality has lapsed.

Fundamentally these decisions come down to our government’s value system. Eight years after a housing crisis was officially declared we are not seeing transformative policy’s reflecting the urgency and scale of the problem. If our government was serious about solving the housing crisis, and ensuring everyone had a home, they would have already brought in a construction moratorium to prioritise precious resources for buildings homes, rather than creating more empty offices and energy-sucking data centres.

But since a moratorium can be implemented quickly, we live with Dóchas that this government will come to their senses, and enact a construction moratorium, commencing in 2027.

Jude Sherry and Dr Frank O’Connor are founders of anois.org, ffud.art and #DerelictIreland. They are part of a series of writers, academics and economists penning a weekly essay delving into the housing crisis and potential solutions.