On July 1, Ireland takes over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union for the next six months, and for the first time, housing will sit near the top of that agenda. That is not a coincidence, and it is not just an Irish story. Across Europe, the conversation about housing shortages has shifted. It is no longer framed primarily as a social issue. It is now being framed as an economic competitiveness issue, and that change in framing is hugely significant.
The European Commission has been moving in this direction for some time. The European Parliament backed a European Affordable Housing Plan in 2024, and Brussels has formally acknowledged housing as a social emergency affecting citizens right across the bloc. But the more recent and more interesting development is the language now being used alongside that. Housing shortages are increasingly described as a barrier to labour mobility, to investment, to attracting and retaining talent, and ultimately to economic performance. In other words, when workers cannot find a home, the economy suffers.
During its Presidency, Ireland will be expected to help advance two significant pieces of legislation: the Affordable Housing Act, which aims to help identify areas under housing stress and bring vacant stock back into use, and the Construction Services Act, designed to modernise and harmonise construction regulation across the EU so firms can operate more easily across borders. Both sit inside a wider EU Single Market Strategy that increasingly treats a functioning construction sector as core economic infrastructure, not as a stand-alone industry.
There is something uncomfortable in this for Ireland. We are about to chair the conversation on a problem for which we have one of the worst records in Europe. Ireland’s population growth has consistently outpaced housing delivery for over a decade. Planning delays, fragmented approval processes, and a construction sector that has not scaled with demand are well known to anyone who has tried to buy, sell, or build here in Galway. Ireland holding the EU Presidency will put our under-performance on housing delivery firmly in the spotlight.
There is a clear opportunity in this. If housing delivery is now understood in Brussels as an economic growth issue rather than a purely social concern, the funding, regulatory attention, and political will that follows should be considerably stronger and more durable than the will that follows social issues. Grid infrastructure, transport connectivity, and planning simplification are all explicitly linked in Ireland’s Presidency programme to housing delivery. That linkage, properly used, could unlock investment in infrastructure that has been quietly strangling housing supply for years.
In Galway, our housing constraints are tied directly to infrastructure constraints, the Ring Road, water and wastewater capacity and grid connections for new developments. If Ireland’s Presidency genuinely succeeds in pushing through faster permitting for infrastructure at EU level, it could well prove to be the difference between sites being viable or not.
The shift in framing, from housing as welfare to housing as economic infrastructure, is the right one. It reflects what those of us working in this market every day already know. The question now is whether Ireland uses its six months in the chair to lead on this or simply hosts the conversation while the gap between supply and demand at home keeps widening.
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Johnny Gannon is the founder of Fair Deal Property Auctioneers and Estate Agents. For advice on buying or selling in the Galway market, contact Fair Deal Property on 091 394593.
