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If every building tells a story, the lettering on its facade is the opening sentence. It’s the street number that tells you you’ve arrived at the correct place, the badge of authority on a headquarters, the epigraph that announces the LIBRARY, HOSPITAL, or COURTHOUSE. Facade signage provides a semiotic main entrance for users and passers-by, and is one of a building’s most prominent and visible features. And yet it’s frequently the part executed with the least skill and care. Exiled to the limbo of provisional costs, epigraphs and facade signs are usually dashed off by juniors or cranked out in-house at signage fabricators and slapped onto the completed building like a sticker. Often a building’s designers have no say in how it’s signed. And often, it shows.
It wasn’t always this way. The making and use of letters was once a standard part of architectural education, and a number of architects have made significant contributions to typography in their own right. Bertram Goodhue’s Cheltenham was one of the most popular typefaces of the early twentieth century. Peter Behrens treated architecture, industrial design, and graphic design as strands of a single gesamtkunstwerk, and the Behrensschrift he used for AEG is widely considered the first branding font. Frank Lloyd Wright, Arne Jacobsen, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh all developed distinctive letterforms that could operate as harmonious components of their work. And the iconic stacked facade letters of the Dessau Bauhaus were created by Gropius’s fellow architect Herbert Bayer.
This is not a Trad Guy plea for more Sainsbury Wing-style lapidary inscriptions (brilliant as Michael Harvey's lettercarving was) or a typographer’s special pleading for more prominent letters. (If anything, poorly designed facade signs are usually too shouty.) It’s a plea for recognition of type as a small but integral element in the making of good buildings. If architects are no longer trained to use letters, perhaps they should collaborate with people who are: sympathetic practitioners who understand how they can contribute to and support a building’s aims. While a few budgets allow for extensive typographic systems and even bespoke typefaces, for most jobs the fees charged by competent typographers are less than the costs of fabrication. For commercial clients, a building may be the most expensive brand statement they'll ever make; it's worth it to set aside a few quid to see that brand is properly represented. And when the budget only allows for off-the-shelf signage solutions, a trained typographer can help ensure these are chosen well and applied appropriately. What’s wanted is not a bigger role for letters in architecture, but a more considered one.
Present Tense is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
1. Source: A Practice for Everyday Life.
2. Source: St Peter's Basilica and Love in the City of Lights.
3. Source: Pentagram and Wallpaper.
The idea that politicians will manipulate or misrepresent data to paint a favourable picture, as seen at last November’s election when multiple government ministers claimed 40,000 houses would be built in 2024, knowing full well that was nigh-on impossible, is nothing new. Back in the 1960s, new houses were counted when any grants due were paid, and on becoming the new minister with responsibility for housing, Niall Blaney made sure housing grants were paid under his tenure and not the previous incumbents, so he could claim credit for houses started and finished before he was in office. That’s politics, and often housing, one of the most political of policy areas.
Sixty-odd years later, data is still being misused and abused. In some ways, it is more worrying now as data increasingly informs policy (a good thing), but the data is often not independent, nor rigorous in its production (not so good).
When tackling the issue of housing completions, it is important to note that since the 1970s we now count a new house when it is connected to the electricity grid. The issue here is that housing is most often connected to the electricity grid long before it is finished, and so it could be up to a year before the ‘connected’ house is ready to occupy. Neither does being connected to the electricity grid mean it is legal to occupy – that status is only conferred on receipt of a Certificate of Compliance on Completion (a ‘Completion Cert’).
So, housing completion numbers are nine to twelve months ahead of themselves. 2024’s 30,300 ‘completions’ will come on stream for occupation all through 2025, and maybe even into 2026. Our completions aren’t really complete.
Indeed, we are lucky we are counting houses properly at all. Until 2017, the Department of Housing had been overcounting the number of new houses being completed in the country by up to 58%. New electricity connections had been including every “warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse” – to misquote Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive – as well as actual houses. Defending his overzealous officials, the Minster at the time said: “All I can do is use the same methodology that we’ve always used” [1], which was untrue.
Under his successor, Eoghan Murphy, it was discovered that the officials knew all along the numbers were overestimated when he asked them to calculate more accurate statistics – “Yes, but the right figure will show fewer new houses, Minister.”
There are question marks hanging over a lot of other data too. Are we really short 484,000 new houses in Ireland, or some 22% of the current housing stock, as per a recent report from Hooke and MacDonald, the estate agents whose main business is selling apartments? Why do we count density per hectare in terms of the number of housing units (e.g. eighty per hectare) instead of number of bedspaces, which is a much better metric as it focuses on the number of people being accommodated. The answer, of course, is that more units generate more rental income, and increasing bedspace density would mean having to build larger apartments, thus reducing the income-generation potential of developments.
Will more supply bring down house prices? No, it never has, as supply is only a small part of house price inflation – interest rates and wages are much bigger drivers. Should it really cost €590,000 to build a two-bedroom apartment? Councils do it for an average of €345,000.
Do we really need €20 billion a year of international investment in the Irish housing system, most of which will be used to build apartments solely for rent? This is a typology few want for a plethora of reasons (poor construction and challenging owners management issues, for example), and a tenure about which the Department of Housing’s own research contradictorily found 86% of non-home owners aged 25-49 want to be home-owners? Homeless numbers bizarrely only count those with some form of a roof over their heads, and also exclude 3,500 homeless international protection applicants.
According to the Central Statistics Office, Ireland had 163,433 vacant houses at the last census in 2022. According to GeoDirectory, a commercial database company set up by An Post and Tailte Éireann, there are less than half that number – at just over 82,000 empty houses. That is quite the difference, and yet attempts to understand this difference by looking at GeoDirectory’s methodology (the CSO’s is publicly available) are difficult as they don’t release it. Yet it is the GeoDirectory number that ministers cite when they want to underplay their lack of progress in tackling vacant housing for many years now.
This is all fun and games for housing data nerds, but it is also highly risky. A lot of panic-inducing common narratives are provably untrue (e.g. RPZs don’t work), yet still recited ad nauseum by wilfully or otherwise naive politicians and other commentators, and are sometimes found influencing housing policy. Claims that tens of thousands of housing units were held up by judicial review led to legally dubious sections in the new Planning and Development Act. Claims that it is simply not viable (whatever that means) to build apartments has led to subsidies of up to nearly €250,000 per apartment [2]. Claims that we are short an untold number of apartments will lead to further wooing of international money; and so on. All of this comes at a cost, not always financial.
Policy then becomes policy for those with political access, investors, and other overseas landlords, not policy for decent housing. Ireland’s official housing document, ‘Housing for All’, becomes ‘Housing for the Top One Per Cent’, as like in all good housing crises, the political and lobbyists answer to a housing crisis is yet more luxury housing.
In the absence of a meaningful response from the state, the private sector has the state over a barrel. Housing policy will never succeed when its foundations are wobbly.
In the the context of the recent controversy around housing completion figures, Dr Lorcan Sirr explores the subjectivity of housing statistics, and the impact these figures have on housing policy.
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Ireland is one of the most expensive places in Europe to build a home. Materials and labor have been outpacing inflation since the 1990s. Irish apartments are now subject to rules so strict that they’re the second most expensive in Europe [1] to construct. On top of these high construction costs, there's another factor weighing on prices: the cost of basic infrastructure – water pipes, roads, community parks – that new residents end up footing. I want to talk about how spreading the costs more fairly could benefit everyone, not just newcomers.
Historically, local authorities used to pay for infrastructure through a combination of national grants, commercial rates, and domestic rates, which had been in place for decades. In 1978, though, the Local Government (Financial Provisions) Act removed domestic rates. That decision effectively ended the system where water and other utilities were funded by the public as a whole. Today, first-time buyers and renters shoulder a heavier share of the bill.
Take water connections as an example. Uisce Éireann manages and maintains Ireland’s water infrastructure and is overseen by the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities. In principle, it receives the bulk of its budget from central government. However, under the Planning and Development Act 2000, new developments also pay a Section 48 levy to local authorities and a separate water connection charge to Uisce Éireann itself. Of the agency's total funding in 2024, about €72 million [2] came directly from new domestic connections. And much of these charges are passed onto first-time buyers and renters.
The most recent iteration of Uisce Éireann charges come from the 'Shared Quotable Rebate' (SQR) system. It was introduced to address the ‘first mover disadvantage’, where a developer faced with the cost of building water infrastructure is deterred by the high upfront cost. The SQR tries to fix that by offering partial rebates to the initial investor if later developers connect to the same infrastructure. Unfortunately, it does so by shouldering the first mover with significant upfront costs.
Increasing the upfront cost of delivering homes decreases housing supply by discouraging investment in housing, a point firmly made by the Report of the Housing Commission. It makes investment in housing riskier than it already is and that is something Ireland cannot afford. The Department of Finance [3] says that to deliver 50,000 homes a year, approximately €16.9 billion would be required from private capital sources. Making that investment riskier by increasing the upfront cost will inevitably result in fewer homes.
Underpinning all of this is a question of fairness: why should people who don’t yet own a home pay more for water or roads than those who have lived in the area for decades? A more promising path is to spread these essential costs across all residents through local property taxes, much as local authorities did before 1978 through domestic rates. Reintroducing that broader tax base doesn’t just solve a moral dilemma; it also supports a more robust approach to financing critical infrastructure.
When the burden of infrastructure is shared, builders can invest more confidently in new homes. That means more projects can move forward, and the houses or apartments that get built are more affordable than they would be under the current system. Lower home prices, in turn, make it easier for first-time buyers to enter the market.
Such a shift also creates a better incentive structure for local authorities and residents. With a broader property tax base, local governments can collect predictable and reliable revenues from both existing and newly built homes. They would have a stronger reason to champion growth in their communities – because every new project would predictably contribute to the overall fiscal health of the community. Rather than relying on upfront fees which slow down development, property tax revenues grow as developments fill up. Revenues can then be reinvested in better roads, public spaces, and social services, further enhancing the area’s appeal and attracting more residents and businesses, creating a win-win for local residents and newcomers.
Sharing the costs of infrastructure across all taxpayers isn’t just about fairness (although it is about that). It is about making the incentives of development align toward shared prosperity. The payoff is a virtuous cycle in which everyone – newcomers and existing residents alike – benefits from a healthier housing market and a better-resourced public realm.
In the midst of the housing crisis, Seán O'Neill McPartlin discusses the increasing inequality in how we fund infrastructure, and the need to share this burden to incentivise new development.
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It is not quite as famous as Murphy’s law but in Ireland Parkinson’s Law of Triviality might be the one we should pay closer heed to. This ‘law’ – named after the famous historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson – observes the human weakness for getting caught up in trivial details at the expense of the bigger picture.
To illustrate his case, Parkinson put forward an imagined committee in charge of developing a nuclear reactor. This committee then spent as much time worrying about what material to use for the staff bicycle shed as other critical elements of the project. People sometimes refer to the ‘law’ as ‘bike-shedding’ – a term which has taken on a whole new meaning in the vocabulary of Ireland over the past six months.
Last July, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Office of Public Works seeking details of how much had been spent on a new bicycle shelter for Leinster House. It was one of hundreds of such information requests that I submit each year to a whole range of public bodies including government departments, local authorities, hospitals, and state agencies. That particular Sunday, I wrote a story – just 435 words in length – sent it to the national newspapers, and got ready to enjoy the rest of the day. Unwittingly, I had just thrown a hand grenade into the court of public opinion.
The €336,000 cost of the project was described as ‘inexplicable and inexcusable’ by Taoiseach Simon Harris and became a meme on social media. It was dissected at the Public Accounts Committee, raised in general election debates, covered by the BBC and The Guardian, and became a touchstone for public anger over spending of taxpayer money.
Yet, in the greater scheme of things – it was a miniscule project, loose change when set against for example the €2 billion-plus cost of the National Children’s Hospital. What it did carry though was resonance and meaning. The cost of the Children’s Hospital, whether it eventually ends up being €2.2 billion, €2.3 billion, or €2.4 billion can be a little too abstract. Every extra €100 million that gets added to the bill would build nearly 300 Leinster House bicycle sheds, but that’s not so easy to quantify mentally.
A €336,000 bicycle shelter though? That carries everyday meaning. It’s the price of building a house or thereabouts. When we think about a sum of money like that, it’s tangible – we all know what we could do with it if we had it. But when we think about €100 million, what would that buy us and what exactly does it look like? How does a lay person – or indeed a journalist – tell the difference between two major projects, both costing the same amount of money? Which one of them was too expensive? And which one was executed to near perfection and achieved maximum value for money for the taxpayer?
There was a certain bitter irony in the bicycle shelter story, too.
A few years ago, I spent months working on a documentary with RTÉ Investigates and reporter Paul Murphy about the operations of the Office of Public Works. The programme highlighted a series of OPW projects: cases where land was purchased, or leases were signed at a sometimes-tremendous loss to the taxpayer. This included the €30 million purchase of the still-idle Thornton Hall in North Dublin for development of a ‘super-prison’. The programme featured a lengthy contribution from Allen Morgan, a retired valuer from the OPW, who courageously went public about his experiences working in the public sector.
He and a colleague had once prepared what was known as the ‘five-case review’, selecting a few cases (or basket cases) from the annals of the OPW. ‘We were just asked for examples,’ Morgan said, ‘We didn’t think there was much point in giving twenty [cases] and we certainly could have.’ Yet the programme, despite airing on primetime TV, did not garner a fraction of the attention that the much simpler story on a bicycle shelter in Leinster House did. And maybe the word ‘simple’ is what is key.
It is so much harder to get to grips with these larger projects, with their complexity and the often-enormous sums of money involved. In the wake of the bicycle shelter story, there was considerable sound and fury from the public, the political sphere, and the public sector. There were promises that this would not happen again but how likely is that really?
For any long-time observer or reporter on Irish society, these stories crop up as steady as a metronome. They follow a similar pattern: revelation, outrage, a vow of reform, before being forgotten. Direct accountability is almost always absent. PPARS, e-voting machines, the FÁS Science Challenge programme, the Kilkenny flood relief scheme; there have been so many it becomes hard to remember. But if lessons are being learned, what are those lessons? Is it a Department of Infrastructure as has been suggested by the Taoiseach Simon Harris?
If it is the answer, it is hard to find a single person in public service and procurement who agrees. A recent headline in The Irish Times sums up the conundrum we all face when it comes to public spending, most especially mega-projects. A rail spur to connect Navan to the Western Commuter line is now expected to cost €3 billion, according to National Transport Authority forecasts. It will comprise forty kilometres of new track running through predominantly agricultural land and the development of three new stations on the route. As a project, it ticks so many boxes – reducing congestion, reducing car dependence, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But how do we assess its cost? Is the €3 billion estimate too high or too low? How long should the project take and how long will it take?
More transparency around these projects would help. But more than that, we need a better system of communicating the development of public infrastructure; experts in the field – architects, planners, and engineers – using social media and the media to explain the nuances and complexities. There is a glaring knowledge gap in how these projects are funded and developed. And until that gap is filled, it remains extremely difficult to hold public bodies to account for how they are executed.
In this article, Ken Foxe recalls his role in exposing the series of controversies surrounding public works spending, the opaque nature of procurement, and what the state can do to better communicate the nature of these developments.
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