Ireland has loads of land; we're talking over 6 million hectares of agricultural space alone; yet we're shoehorned into tiny, identical houses jammed together like sardines, with apartments overlooking your neighbour's bog roll. New house sizes have plummeted: the average single-family home is now just 216 sqm floor area (down 24 sqm since 2011), while scheme houses scrape by at 119 sqm and apartments at a ridiculous 72 sqm. Even an hour outside Dublin, you're lucky to get a 250-300 sqm plot, and parking? Forget it; new guidelines push for "minimal" or zero spaces in suburbs to fight climate change, leaving families double-parking on verges.
Developers love this because cranking out 500 carbon-copy boxes is cheap and quick; no need for creativity or quality when planning rules force density over decency. Gone are the days of bungalows with proper gardens or unique designs; now it's row after row of the same beige eyesores, shrinking year on year to hit government quotas. We're building more units (15,000+ in H1 2025 alone), but they're smaller, uglier, and less liveable, all to pretend we're solving the crisis without using our actual space.
Look at Germany for a better way: they give you a generous 500-800 sqm plot, let you pick a blueprint (or tweak one), and build something that actually fits a family; average living space around 95 sqm but with way more outdoor room and standard garages. No mass-cloning nonsense; suburbs there feel like proper communities, not dystopian barracks. Ireland could mandate bigger minimum plots (say 400 sqm outside cities), force parking per house, and ban identical repeats over 50 units; use the land we've got instead of stacking us like Lego!
No other countries seem to be as bad as this; American, South African, German, French; these houses all look at least a bit unique. Why are we saddled with such awful housing and why do we have to endure it?
