Ireland's Supposed Housing Deficit

[schmittel]

I've asked this question elsewhere and never really got to the bottom of the conundrum, so wondered can anybody here explain.

If you were trying to work out the deficit or surplus relating to the required quantity of anything the first thing you would do is count what you already have in stock. This is not only instinctive and logical, it's one of the first things we learn in maths eg:

Jonny has 5 sweets. He has 3 friends coming to play. He wants to make sure he and his friends have 2 sweets each. How many more sweets does Jonny need to buy?

It's simple. He needs 8 sweets in total. He already has 5, so he needs to buy 3.

5, what he already has, is a very significant number in this calculation.

Amidst all the different experts who have calculated Ireland's supposed housing stock deficit nobody has ever taken in to account either (a) the existing habitable housing stock or (b) the existing population.

If you take the data from Census 2022 housing stock and population, there is no deficit.

This appears to be the inconvenient truth that explains why nobody is willing to use these figures as the basis of their calculation on our supposed apparent housing deficit.

Or am I missing something?

[NattyO]

If you use the 2022 Census numbers, Ireland has a total of 2,112,121 permanent dwellings. According to the same census, the population was 5,149,139. This, by my calculations gives us an average of 2.44 people per dwelling. However, according to the ESRI, we have an average of 2.74 people per dwelling - they actually cite the 2022 census for this figure, so I’m not sure where the discrepancy between their number and my number comes from:
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