Lorcan Sirr: Irish people don’t want to live in ‘mostly awful’ apartments. Here are 5 ways to fix them

Why don’t Irish people want to live in apartments? Only 13 per cent of Irish households live in the country’s 230,000 flats or apartments. In Europe, nearly half of all households live in an apartment or flat.But there are logical reasons for our reluctance. Historically, flats were regarded with suspicion. In a 1932 edition of the Jesuit journal Studies, Fr Fergal McGrath warned that “flat life is an unnatural thing” and “in line with the philosophy of communism”. He warned we should avoid dotting the city with “large barracks of propertyless men”. By the end of the 1940s, twice as many houses as flats had been built by Dublin Corporation and other urban authorities. The public experience of the flawed Ballymun experiment in the 1970s and 1980s did not inspire faith in living in flats. Shoddy construction and fire safety issues in new apartments in the 1990s and 2000s were another – self-inflicted – nail in the coffin for “European apartment living” that taxpayers and owners are still paying for.READ MOREThe Multi-Unit Development Act 2011 regulating communal residential complexes has serious flaws, particularly around the collection of unpaid service charges, inadequate sinking funds and the operation of the owners’ management companies.The political impetus to encourage apartment development has been a desire to attract international landlords for whom smaller, lower-standard apartments yield more profit – while housing fewer people. Apartment standards have therefore been consistently reduced by successive ministers, most recently James Browne, suggesting “a shift in direction to lower-quality solutions driven by short term expediency”, according to architects’ body the RIAI.From 2007 to 2011, Dublin City Council insisted on decent standards due to what it called “high levels of dissatisfaction” among apartment dwellers: the smallest permitted size was increased to 45sq m. With just 32sq m now allowed (equivalent to 2.5 car parking spaces), smaller, darker apartments with no balconies to dissipate heat, often unsuitable for wheelchair users, are of little appeal to many households. Despite Ireland having the second highest number of children in Europe after Slovakia, just 11 per cent of apartments here have three bedrooms suitable for a family with two children over 12. As I’ve written here before, the needs of caregivers (mostly women) and children are also completely ignored in the development of new apartments. Austrians were doing this more than 30 years ago. The delusion that most apartment dwellers will simply use public transport has led to limited car spaces and parking overspill to nearby roads and estates, sometimes leading to local tensions.And of course, in the last 15 years, nearly all new apartments have only been available for rent, making them unattractive for households looking for the security and comfort conferred by ownership. With investors absent, local authorities and approved housing bodies (AHBs) are buying up most new apartments to use as social housing. About three quarters of new local authority and AHB social housing in 2025 was purchased from the market in various forms, with little transparency around the use of public funds and deals done. If a new apartment is for sale, there’s the price. In Dublin city in 2025, of 4,519 new completions (of which 4,324 were apartments), just 159 new apartments were sold at a median price of €702,000. In Cork city, the median sales price of a new apartment was €478,000, and 11 were sold out of 1,498 new housing completions (including 279 apartments). Michael Stanley, chief executive of Cairn Homes, which builds a lot of apartments, said in an interview last year with The Irish Times that the narrative about people not wanting to live in apartments was “disinformation”. But studies for the Housing Agency found apartment dwellers had significant issues with the lack of indoor and outdoor space, and noise from neighbours. One Irish Times interviewee said: “ ... the problem is that Irish apartments are mostly awful. Dark, squeezed spaces with poor sound insulation, long corridors of apartments that, if lucky, pay lip-service [to] balconies.” People are increasingly, therefore, buying houses far from where they work and commuting, mostly by car. The midlands, Border and west regions have seen the highest house price increases, up 11 per cent in the Border region in the year to July 2026 and 268 per cent since 2015. According to a judicial review submission challenging the Department of Housing’s 2025 apartment standards, “it is now possible to build entire blocks of 32sq m studio bedsits with no limit on the number of residents sharing a corridor or lift. Up to half of these homes may have no private amenity space.” No surprise then that we persist with the traditional house. The public impetus for more apartments has been associated with increasing housing densities, fitting more houses on to the land. But, as Cliff Taylor has pointed out, “the whole concept of ‘denser living’ has still not been explained in any serious way by Government Ministers”.This is because we are doing it badly. Squeezing more apartments on to land in the absence of integrated transport, shops, amenity space, community facilities or a mixture of household types and sizes that would attract more varied retail uses is not what high-density housing is about. [ ‘I grew up in an apartment in another country. I bought an apartment in Dublin and had to get out after a year’Opens in new window ]So, what makes for successful apartment living? I have lived in apartments in five countries – Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary and Spain – and have seen what makes them work. The apartment has to be a suitable size, catering for people throughout their lives – single, with family, and maybe alone again – so generally 80-90sq m (flexible and resource-efficient) with some outdoor space. There must be laundry rooms and storage areas. The apartment needs to be in the right area. Local services such as shops, schools, cafes, hairdressers, bars and amenity space are vital for quality of life and creating communities. Being near functioning public transport means car use is reduced or redundant. My apartment blocks in Stockholm and Hungary had a permanent caretaker living at reduced rent (retired soldiers in both cases) taking in deliveries and doing minor repairs and maintenance, reducing the need for expensive management companies and security. Design and density are not trivial issues. Poorly designed homes are socially and economically destructive and can “diminish Ireland’s international competitiveness”, as the RIAI has warned – especially when it comes to retaining talent. The opposite is also true.Unfortunately, despite the Revised National Planning Framework 2025 unilaterally deciding that “apartments and compact housing models will need to become more prevalent”, policymakers have been front and centre in making apartment living a less than appealing housing choice.Lorcan Sirr is a senior lecturer at TU Dublin, and author of Housing A Nation: Seven Generations of Irish Land, Politics and Power, which is published next week.