Irish Expert Voice ‒ Fall 2025

With the largest capital investment plan in the history of the State in place for the next decade (€275bn) and the recently published new housing plan from Government, the prospects for Ireland’s construction sector are cautiously optimistic. Despite the well documented challenges with delivering infrastructure and housing, the hope is that these plans will provide a stable project pipeline for the critical infrastructure that the economy needs and which will sustain the construction industry into the future. However, success of these plans will be measured against implementation and delivery.

Ireland’s building and construction sector has been experiencing significant challenges, despite the remarkably resilient economy over recent years. The core issues remain the consistent under-delivery of housing and delays to critical infrastructure to support the growing population.

The industry’s performance has seen a robust recovery in the first half of 2025, compared with 2024, following a respectable performance in 2023. New residential investment trends have been disappointing, reflecting a number of challenges to delivering new housing supply over recent years. The non-residential building and construction sub-sector has been persistently weak, with a decline of almost 30% in the volume of public and private non-residential building activity over the last five years. This is difficult to comprehend, at a time when the private sector should have been supported by the momentum in the economy, and the previous National Development Plan, which prioritised increased investment in growth enhancing infrastructure. The latter included energy grid capacity, water supply, transport connectivity and health digitalisation.

The medium-term prospects for construction have been boosted by publication of two relatively ambitious plans by Government: 1) the revised National Development Plan which contains the largest capital investment plan in the history of the State for the next decade (€275bn); and 2) the recently published new housing plan, ‘Delivering Homes, Building Communities’, which aims to facilitate the delivery of a total of 300,000 new homes by 2030, compared with just over 30,000 in 2024. The hope is that these plans will provide a stable project pipeline for the critical infrastructure that the economy needs now and into the future. Although growth momentum in the economy is projected to soften, growth in the building and construction industry is expected to return to a more respectable trajectory over the medium-term.

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