Ireland's Empty Buildings

In the middle of a housing crisis, Ireland has tens of thousands of empty buildings. That uncomfortable fact has become one of the defining paradoxes of Irish public life, visible on every main street, in every small town, and in the upper floors above shops in the centre of Dublin. So why does the vacancy persist, and what it would actually take to bring these buildings back into use?

This article looks at what the evidence says about the scale of the problem, the real barriers to redevelopment, how much of it genuinely requires a full professional planning team, and whether better access to information could help ordinary owners understand what is and isn't possible with the building in front of them.

The problem, by the numbers

Ireland has no single agreed figure for vacancy, and that is itself part of the story. Three sources measure three different things:

• Census 2022 recorded 163,433 vacant dwellings (around 8% of the housing stock), but the CSO itself cautions that this figure "should not be used as a measure of long-term vacancy," as it includes properties between lettings, under renovation, for sale, or where the owner was deceased or in care (CSO, Census 2022 Profile 2 - Housing in Ireland).
• CSO's electricity-based measure - dwellings consuming less than 180kWh per quarter for four consecutive quarters - gives a much lower figure of 70,149 vacant homes (3.2%) at end 2024 (CSO, Residential Vacancy Based on Metered Electricity Consumption 2024; Irish Times, 24 March 2026).
• GeoDirectory's Q2 2025 report recorded 80,328 vacant and 19,821 derelict residential properties (GeoDirectory Residential Buildings Report Q2 2025).

Commercial vacancy tells a grimmer story. GeoDirectory's Q4 2025 report recorded a 14.6% national commercial vacancy rate - the highest since tracking began in 2013, covering 30,687 units (GeoDirectory, February 2026). Dublin has Ireland's lowest residential vacancy at around 1.1%, but its commercial vacancy sits at 13.5%, with Dublin 2 and Dublin 8 both above 17%.

Then there is the enforcement gap. Local authority Derelict Sites Registers contained just 2,140 sites at the end of 2024 - a tiny fraction of GeoDirectory's 20,000-plus derelict residential count. The Anois/#DerelictIreland campaign documented 700 derelict properties within 2km of Cork city centre against only 95 on the official register (Irish Examiner). In 2023, just €604,621 in derelict sites levies was collected nationally, and 17 of 31 councils collected nothing at all (Irish Times, 19 March 2025; TheJournal.ie, March 2025).

Why aren't these buildings being fixed?

The barriers are not one problem but several, and they interact.

Money is the biggest barrier. The most important evidence here is the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland's Real Cost of Renovation Report (March 2023), which assessed twenty vacant and derelict properties across the country and found that only five were financially viable to renovate without grant support. Even with maximum Croí Cónaithe grants, only one additional property became viable. The viability gap is most acute outside Dublin, where market values are lower but renovation costs are broadly the same (SCSI, 2023; Irish Times, 22 March 2023). Eighty per cent of surveyors surveyed said it was harder for borrowers to access finance for renovation than for a standard purchase, because banks generally will not lend against a property that isn't habitable (IFSC, 2023).

Construction VAT sits at 13.5% under an EU derogation, with no reduced rate for long-vacant properties. National rebuild costs rose a further 7% in 2025 (SCSI House Rebuilding Guide, 2025), and Ireland's construction workforce remains well below the level needed to meet both new-build and retrofit demand simultaneously.

Regulation is the second barrier, but a more targeted one than is often assumed. Over half of surveyors in the SCSI study said building regulations - particularly Part B (fire safety) and Part M (disability access) - were "too restrictive" for older properties, where meeting modern standards in narrow historic shells can be physically very difficult (SCSI, 2023). Ireland has over 40,000 Protected Structures nationally, including more than 8,000 in Dublin, and for these buildings even internal works can require planning permission if they materially affect character (RIAI; Dublin Civic Trust).

Ownership is the third. Probate delays routinely run six to eighteen months, and the Law Society has documented "seven deadly delays" in conveyancing that can stall sales of inherited vacant properties (Law Society of Ireland, 2024). The government's CPO Activation Programme entered 11,186 properties between 2023 and 2024, but compulsory purchase typically takes around 18 months and is constitutionally constrained (gov.ie).

Information is the fourth, and the most overlooked. A prospective renovator currently has to consult MyPlan.ie for zoning, the relevant local authority's planning portal for application history, buildingsofireland.ie for heritage designations, floodinfo.ie for flood risk, landdirect.ie for title, the Building Control Management System for regulations history, An Bord Pleanála for appeals, GeoDirectory for vacancy data, and the derelict sites register. Each has a different interface and a different update cycle. Research led by Prof Rob Kitchin at Maynooth University documents how Ireland's planning data sits across dozens of non-interoperable systems, making it hard even for professionals to build a full picture of any one site (Kitchin et al., "Genealogy of a data ecosystem," Digital Geography & Society, 2025).

Not every vacant building needs a planning team

This is where the conversation tends to flatten out, because the word "planning" gets used as a catch-all for regulatory difficulty. It's worth being specific.

Under the Planning and Development Act 2000 and the exempted development regulations, a very wide range of works can be carried out on an existing dwelling without any planning application at all: internal alterations that don't affect external appearance, rear extensions up to 40 square metres (cumulative since 1964), garages and sheds up to 25 square metres, solar panels, chimneys, and repainting or replastering consistent with neighbouring buildings (Citizens Information). Converting vacant commercial premises to residential has also been exempt from planning permission since 2018, subject to conditions, under SI 30/2018 as extended by SI 75/2022. By May 2025, that exemption alone had generated 1,457 notifications creating 3,429 new homes through a simple notification process rather than a full application (gov.ie).

The upshot is that for something like two-thirds of vacant residential buildings in Ireland, ordinary houses and flats needing internal renovation, planning permission simply isn't the barrier. The real obstacles are finance, finding a builder, and knowing what you're looking at. A further slice of vacant commercial buildings can move to residential use via notification rather than full application. Full planning complexity concentrates on two categories: non-exempt change of use, and works to protected structures or buildings in Architectural Conservation Areas, which together probably account for 5-10% of visible vacancy but are disproportionately represented on the main streets where dereliction is most obvious.

None of this is to say the system is easy, or that people should proceed without professional advice. For protected structures, for anything involving structural work, and for any non-trivial change of use, an architect and ideally a conservation specialist are essential, not optional. But there is a meaningful difference between a project that requires a full planning team and one that a well-informed owner can take on with a good builder, a surveyor, and clear information about what rules apply.

What the government is doing

The Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant (Croí Cónaithe) has become the quiet success story: €247 million paid across 4,514 completed homes by the end of 2025, with 3,066 grants paid in 2025 alone - a 127% increase on the previous year (Anglo Celt, February 2026; gov.ie). The grant is paid in arrears, which remains a real problem for people without savings, but the Local Authority Purchase and Renovation Loan launched in July 2024 now helps bridge that gap for first-time buyers.

Other schemes have fared much worse. The Repair and Leasing Scheme delivered just 9 homes in its first year against an 800-home target (RTÉ). The Living City Initiative, a tax incentive for refurbishing pre-1915 buildings, attracted only 242 applications in Dublin over an entire decade, described in the Irish Times as "shockingly poor" uptake (Irish Times, 16 October 2025). The URDF Revolving Vacancy Fund of €150 million had purchased just 47 homes after its first year.

A Derelict Property Tax administered by Revenue rather than local authorities is planned from around 2027, following the logic that Revenue collects around 95% of the Local Property Tax while councils collected roughly 10% of the derelict sites levy (gov.ie). A new Vacant Above the Shop Grant of up to €140,000 launched in March 2026.

What if the information were in one place?

This is the question that sits underneath everything above. Research from Maynooth University describes Ireland's planning data as a fragmented ecosystem in which individual applications can be processed but cross-system intelligence, the kind of picture needed to understand a specific site's constraints, history, and opportunities, is extraordinarily difficult to assemble (Kitchin et al., 2025). The Office of the Planning Regulator's own Digital Planning and Analytics Strategy 2023-2025 commits to building "a single point of access to digital datasets held disparately by various bodies and organisations."

International comparators suggest consolidation works. Scotland's eDevelopment.scot processes 95% of all planning applications through one portal, with estimated savings of over £100 million for applicants. England's PlanX platform has delivered significant time savings on applications and large increases in community involvement in pilot areas. The Netherlands' Omgevingsloket, launched in January 2024, lets any citizen check the rules that apply at a specific address and determine whether they need a permit at all.

The point is not that technology replaces expertise. It is the opposite. When someone can see, in one place, that a building they're interested in is not a protected structure, is not in a flood zone, has a clean planning history, and sits in a zone where residential use is permitted, they can make an informed judgement about whether the next step is a builder, architect or planner, and if it's a planner, what questions to ask. When the constraints are significant, it is a protected structure, it is in an ACA, it does have a refusal history, that same information tells them early that they need specialist advice before they sink money into a purchase. The Town Centre First policy (gov.ie) explicitly calls for "improved data sources, defined measurement requirements and research on cost benefit analysis" as part of its approach to town centre revival.

For professionals, the same consolidation cuts the hours spent assembling site histories from half a dozen portals. For curious members of the public who have inherited an old family home, or who walk past the same boarded-up building on the way to work every day and wonder what it would take, it answers the first and most paralysing question: where do I even start?

Conclusion

Ireland's vacancy problem is a financial viability problem for properties outside the big cities, a legal-ownership problem for inherited and absentee-owned homes, a regulatory problem for protected structures and complex change-of-use cases, and an information problem that sits on top of all of them and makes everything harder than it needs to be.

The encouraging news is that the majority of vacant homes don't need heroic planning interventions, but money, a builder, and clarity. Grant take-up is finally accelerating. Enforcement is shifting to Revenue. Exempted development rules are being reviewed. And the work of researchers and campaigners, from the SCSI's costings to Anois's street-level surveys to Maynooth's data research, is steadily reframing vacancy as a solvable problem rather than an inevitable feature of the Irish landscape.

The final barrier, and perhaps the most tractable, is simply knowing what you're looking at. Better access to consolidated map data, site history, and constraint information doesn't replace the architect, the surveyor, or the planner. It helps people understand when to call them, and gives those professionals a stronger starting point when they pick up the phone.

Key sources

• CSO, Census 2022 Profile 2 - Housing in Ireland and Residential Vacancy Based on Metered Electricity Consumption 2024
• GeoDirectory/EY, Residential Buildings Report Q2 2025 and Commercial Buildings Report Q4 2025
• Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, Real Cost of Renovation Report (March 2023) and House Rebuilding Guide (2025)
• RIAI, Old House New Home and guidance on protected structures
• Heritage Council, Collaborative Town Centre Health Check Programme
• Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Vacant Homes Action Plan 2023-2026, Bringing Back Homes Manual, Town Centre First Policy
• Kitchin, R. et al., "Genealogy of a data ecosystem: The digitalisation of planning development and control in Ireland, 2000-2024," Digital Geography & Society (2025)
• Stokes & O'Callaghan (TCD), Taking Stock of Dublin's Vacant Sites and Properties (2021)
• Office of the Planning Regulator, Digital Planning and Analytics Strategy 2023-2025
• Irish Times, Irish Examiner, TheJournal.ie, RTÉ and Anglo Celt reporting (2023-2026), as cited inline