Countries across the Western world are “looking to” Ireland for notes on how to fix their housing crisis, according to Housing Minister James Brown.
Speaking at a Budget Week press conference on Tuesday, Brown was defending the increased funding provided for housing under Budget 2026, saying the increase is “needed”, and that many countries in the West now have a housing crisis.
“This funding is needed to deliver social and affordable housing,” he said.
“We’ve seen a significant increase on costs, not just in Ireland. I was in Copenhagen only last week, and you know, Romania, Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Spain are all in a housing crisis now. This is something that has really engulfed, I think, a lot of the Western world, so it has.”
He added that many countries were now looking to Ireland for tips on how to approach the housing problem.
“And a lot of them are looking to us for programs because we’ve kind of been working our way through it, especially around our affordable housing type programmes. So I’m confident this funding is needed.”
The Minister said that on the capital side, nearly one in three euros of all of capital funding over the next five years would be spent on either housing, or water to help deliver housing.
“So I’m confident with the right plan that we can deliver housing and get to the other side of this,” he said.
“But one of the challenges we have seen in the last 10 years that maybe other countries haven’t seen is a rapid increase in population as well. And in some way trying to hit a moving target at the same time, increase housing delivery. We had undersupply for a long time. Now we’re trying to deliver the housing that people need. But at the same time, our population has increased.”