Urgent action is necessary, say Dublin agents, if the Irish capital is to cope with its forecast rise in population over the next 30 years.
The Republic of Ireland’s Central Statistical Office recently predicted that the population of the Greater Dublin Area will be 54% higher at 2.2m by 2031. If these projections are fulfilled, 47.5% of the country’s total population will be living in the greater Dublin area compared with 38.8% in 1996.
Brian Turner, economist at Hamilton Osborne King (HOK) in Dublin, thinks that population growth of this magnitude in the Dublin area is only feasible if housing density is increased. Noting that the government is committed to higher densities linked with improvements in public transport, he said: “It is going to have to be well planned with no low density urban sprawl.”
Eunan O’Carroll, managing director Gunne Residential, said that while everyone was monitoring the number of house completions, not enough attention was being paid to the location of these houses. Citing recent research which found that 18,000 out of the total 49,000 units completed last year were one-off houses in the countryside, he said there was an urgent need for the government to establish a national housing authority with the power to dictate the location of accommodation. A combination of increasing population and decreasing household size in the Greater Dublin Area would only sustain pressure on the housing market, he added.
A National Spatial Plan, currently in preparation, is likely to include measures to promote dispersal of population away from Dublin. IDA Ireland, the state development agency, now offers few incentives for inward investment to locate in the Dublin area if it can locate elsewhere and it is acquiring land for industrial and office development in provincial towns.
Marion Finnegan, head of research at Sherry Fitzgerald, pointed out that the projected growth of Dublin’s population will raise density to 4,000 people per square mile. While this is not particularly high by international standards, she said: “It is absolutely ludicrous when the rest of the country will have a density of barely 100 people per square mile. The negative implications of this both in terms of asset price inflation for the already scare housing resource in the eastern corridor and in terms of physical congestion would almost certainly undermine the competitiveness of our economy.”
To compound the problem, nobody knows where the regional growth centres are going to be until the Spatial Plan is completed, Finnegan added. “People need to know where the government is going to create the infrastructure before they invest,” she said.
EGi News 28/06/01
