Marian Finnegan

speaker

404 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 19 Aug

Marian Finnegan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Inside Business with Ciaran Hancock · How many new homes does Ireland really need? · 19 Aug 2026 podcast

But if the pressure points remain as strong as they are, we might need to go down that route of saying for particular areas the measures are more concentrated or more attractive.

Particularly.

rates are not high in the West.

You can see them

However, John, if no one answers the door.

no no, there's a visual inspection, but if no one answers the door and the property looks like it is inhabitable, it will be d demarked as a vacant property.

And we have seen that in countless census, that if the property looks inhabitable and they don't get a returned form, it's deemed to be a vacant property.

And we all know when we look at the vacancy levels that the census produced and when they were further interrogated by the local authorities that there was large cohorts of of of

Property that were deemed to be vacant that were not vacant, that had electricity, that had sky, that had um um other services being delivered to them, and people simply did not fill in the form for whatever personal reasons they did.

So the vacancy rate as per the census is not reliable, and that's been stated by an awful lot of researchers in the marketplace.

It isn't an effective measure of housing stock.

However, if you count the properties available for sale.

And if there's less than one percent of the stock available for sale, when we need a natural level of supply, that's a bigger indicator of what the stock levels are like in the market.

And if house prices are rising in rural Ireland by almost ten percent, there is a reason for that.

If there were thousands of vacant properties, we wouldn't have this challenge.

that's why you you get concerned about making localized tax incentives because it can lead to the wrong type of development.

But I think if you think of say we build thirty-six to forty thousand houses a year and you break that down into the twenty-six counties and you look at small locations, the viability not on not only in terms of the price that the person can afford in that location, but also the cost inflation of actually building a small number of houses in a small location.

You're not getting economies of scale.

People are more likely or developers are more likely to look at areas of high population in the first instance.

So I think if we don't address it, we're going to find that uh large cohort locations around the country will not see the adequate supply and therefore we're going to have a really poorly dispersed population.

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