Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
“DESPERATE TIMES CALL for… level-headed measures” could be the slogan for Dublin’s newest planned town, Ballyboggan.
Not the most exciting of phrases – because, while Ballyboggan is certainly welcome, it’s not the most exciting of developments.
Well, perhaps that’s a little harsh.
Dublin City Council has proposed building the ‘new town’ of Ballyboggan on the site of the Dublin Industrial Estate, opposite Glasnevin Cemetery on the north side of the city.
Three quarters of the land would be zoned for residential use, with the rest for enterprise and community uses.
It’s estimated about 6,000 houses could be delivered. With the typical household size being three people, this means about 15,000 people could be housed.
And these residents won’t be living just anywhere. The site is just 3km from Dublin city centre, with excellent transport links including a rail and Luas connection.
So the plan is good news. And there’s a positive in seeing Dublin City Council taking the initiative with a major residential development.
So why the snarky slogan suggestion?
It’s because while the Ballyboggan proposal is a good one, it could and should be much more ambitious.
Most of the proposed buildings on the site would be three to four storeys, with a small number going as high as eight.
Simply put, we should be doing much more with undeveloped sites located in prime areas near Dublin city centre.
Rather than aiming to build 6,000 homes, we could look at building far more by increasing the average height of the new buildings. The default should be six to eight storeys.
Why? Doubling the height in this way would lead to much greater density, delivering far more homes.
The scale of the housing crisis demands it.
The number of new homes built in Ireland has been stuck at about 30,000 per year for the last three years.
For much of that period, house price inflation has been running at about 10%. An estimated seven in ten 25-year-olds live at home, while many older renters face living in near poverty in retirement.
In the face of such an enormous problem, state agencies should be bold.
Previously, this column has looked at the impact building new homes will have on house prices. At a simplistic level, some studies have found that a 1% increase in the number of homes in an area lowers prices by up to 2%.
As of the most recent census in 2022, the Dublin city area had about 250,000 homes.
So Ballyboggan would be a 2.5% increase in housing stock, which theoretically would be a 5% reduction in house prices. Sounds like a pretty good result from just one housing development.
But then, consider that Dublin house prices rose by over 8% in 2024 alone. All else being equal, Ballyboggan would just slow inflation, not stop it. And only for a single year.
Of course, there are other housing developments being built in the Dublin city area. The point of this mental exercise is to show that while 6,000 houses might sound like a lot, its impact on housing affordability might not actually be as big as expected.
There aren’t many residential sites left in the Dublin city area with the potential to deliver as many homes as Ballyboggan.
Going six to eight storeys would likely allow closer to 10,000 homes to be built. This has also been found to be the ideal height to make apartments economically viable for developers.
But besides that, we should be absolutely maximising housing delivery.
And yet, a look at the Ballyboggan master plan doesn’t give the impression that officials appreciate the urgency needed.
For a start, it says the proposal “represents the implementation of the National Planning Framework (NPF) at a local level in the city”. The NPF is a national state document which had housing targets based on 2016 population figures, which are now seriously out of date.
While the NPF was updated in April 2025, the Ballyboggan master plan was first published in April 2024 and finalised in October.
The document also uses language which points to how slightly higher buildings are generally viewed negatively.
Talking about an area of Ballyboggan where only buildings of up to four storeys are planned, it says that lower building heights “are required adjacent in order to safeguard the residential amenity of this mature residential area”.
Again, it’s understandable why the council would think this way. They want to minimise local objections and get the project moving faster.
But it points to a big problem in Dublin. Most of the capital already has ‘mature’ buildings with low heights. This is true even smack bang in the city centre, where there are plenty of two storey buildings.
If we were to limit ourselves to only building low-rise in these ‘mature’ areas, we’re saying there’s almost nowhere that we can build high rise developments.
And again, that’s only if you even consider eight storeys ‘tall’. This is completely standard in many continental European cities, which tend to have better density and more affordable housing than Dublin.
Really, it’s doubtful whether there should be height limits at all. The masterplan talks about concerns of “monolithic slab blocks” if large standalone buildings were constructed. But does this concern really outweigh the needs of people without a place to live?
More density would also mean the homes which are built would take up less space. People will rightly complain of issues that mass house-building causes in an area. Traffic is the most obvious one, as well as the strain on local services, such as schools and doctors.
Building up means there’s more space available for the likes of public transport. It would also mean extra people could be housed while maintaining the plans in the masterplan for communal areas such as parks.
Finally, Irish housing consultations tend to have plenty of concern for the people who already live in an area. But we don’t think too much about those who would like to live somewhere, and need to be housed.
With that in mind, it’s worth looking at the public consultation for the Ballyboggan plan. The bulk of the submissions to public consultations around new housing developments are normally from people objecting to the proposals.
However, with Ballyboggan, it’s the opposite. Plenty of people have written to Dublin City Council expressing disappointment with the lack of ambition for the site.
The submissions article articulate the issue well, here’s a small sample:
Although there were only several dozen submissions at the time of writing, the fact that most of them are in favour of increased height and density is noteworthy.
It’s time for Dublin City Council, and Irish local state bodies in general, to be bolder in tackling the housing crisis. The time to try to fix this by slowly building out miles of low-density housing estates has passed.
Tens of thousands of new homes are needed, and the only way to do that in a city as small as Dublin is to build up. This of course has to be planned around – providing good transport, access to facilities, and so on.
Ballyboggan could and should be a model of this approach. Slow and steady hasn’t worked. Dramatic change is needed.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say