The County and City Management Association is "preparing a business case for the Department of Housing for additional staff for Housing Delivery across all local authorities”, a council spokesperson said.
As of May, the Housing Delivery Unit of Dublin City Council had 167 people working in it, shows a table released under the Freedom of Information Act.
This accounts for less than 3 percent of its more than 6,000-strong workforce.
On the face of it, this may seem a very low figure, given the ongoing affordable housing crisis in the city.
But would more people employed directly by the council and assigned to housing delivery, mean more homes built?
The council only directly builds a very small share of the homes built in the city, even when the focus is on just social and affordable homes.
Last year, both independent Councillor John Lyons and Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan pointed to figures showing that the council was to deliver only 14 percent of the homes directly in the coming years.
Instead of the council building homes, much of the job of providing them is outsourced to housing charities, the Land Development Agency (LDA), or private developers.
Sure, it would be better if the council was directly building more of homes like it used to do, says Fianna Fáil Councillor Deirdre Heney, who chairs the council's housing committee.
But adding more staff to the housing delivery unit wouldn’t necessarily bring more homes, she says.
She says she has never heard of any complaints about a lack of staff in the housing department, but does hear complaints about a shortage in other areas – like public domain, housing maintenance, and litter wardens.
The council could use more people working on homeless prevention too, she says. “They’re worth their weight in gold.”
But Doolan, who also sits on the housing committee, disagrees.
The fact that less than 3 percent of the council's workforce is in the Housing Delivery Unit absolutely has an impact on provision, he said.
“The council has never recouped the staff to even the pre-austerity levels of 2009 when some of our best, most experienced managers left,” he said.
Fast forwarding to now, the housing need is greater and homelessness levels are worse, he says.
But the council is seriously lacking in planners, architects and project managers, he says. “They're the three things that deliver housing.”
While the council no longer directly employs builders, and contracts out the work, that requires management, Doolan said. “We simply don't have the staff to be able to deliver the housing that's needed for the city."
In explaining the current staffing level and allocations, a spokesperson for the council pointed at the central government.
"While senior management [at the council] oversee day-to-day staff deployment, decisions on overall staffing levels are determined by central government, available funding and policy decisions," he said.
The County and City Management Association (CCMA) – which is a network of the chief executives of councils, and the assistant chief executives of Dublin City Council – is working to convince the government to provide for more staff, he said.
It is "preparing a business case for the Department of Housing for additional staff for Housing Delivery across all local authorities to deliver the targets as per the new Housing Plan ‘Delivering Homes; Building Communities’,” said the spokesperson.
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage said local authorities are independent entities, with responsibility for how they carry out their functions. Council chief executives are responsible for staffing and human resources, they said.
The government's housing plan "Delivering Homes, Building Communities", which runs from 2025 to 2030, sets high-level targets for councils collectively.
The goal is 12,000 new-build social homes a year, it says. That's a target for councils, the Land Development Agency, and housing charities to hit collectively.
A July council report shows that 1,375 affordable and social homes were built in 2025 in the Dublin City Council area, and 865 have been built so far in 2026. The council report projects that, by year's end, that figure will be more than 3,000 homes.
The council appears to have been gearing up its ability to directly build more homes.
In March this year, it announced a big Home Building Programme, for about 4,000 homes across 30 sites, noting that: "This initiative marks one of the largest direct build housing programmes undertaken by a Local Authority."
Heney pointed to the launch last week by Dublin City Council of the procurement competition for its first package of sites through this new Home Building Programme.
The first batch is to deliver new social and affordable homes on five sites of council-owned land, she says.
The plan is to build 110 units at the Church of the Annunciation in Dublin 11; 77 units on Wellmount Road; 106 on Collins Avenue; 66 at Croke Villas and Sackville Avenue; and 288 units in Ballymun.
Early enabling works are already underway on two of the sites, with construction on all five sites expected to get underway by early 2027, says a council press release.
“We're now going out to the market, calling developers to come in and tell us what they can do for us,” Heney says. “It's that type of thing that will build more houses.”
Still, says Doolan, the Sinn Féin councillor, even if central government give the council sufficient funds to build enough houses for Dublin, the problem remains that the level of project management to deliver those projects isn’t there.
And, even if the council wanted to employ more people in the Housing Delivery Unit, it’s not simple, he says.
“They have to go to the department [of housing] to seek sanction. They get the sanction, and then then the department says, ‘Oh yeah, we have to manage the whole process,’” he says.
When the job description goes up, he says, it’s the same for Dublin as it is for Leitrim, Clare and everywhere else.
The job for project management in Dublin is very different to that in some other counties, he says. “It's a different scale.”
“But the department, not one mile down the road from Dublin City Council, says, ‘No, no, we need to do all that. We have to control all that,’” Doolan says. “It’s suffocating Dublin.”
There are a lot of very talented people working for Dublin City Council, but there just isn’t enough of them, he says. The figures released under FOI suggested there are 29 sanctioned posts that sit empty, in the Housing Delivery Unit.
A council spokesperson said it takes a strategic and proactive approach to workforce planning.
“This ensures we have the resources needed to deliver the five-year objectives set out in our Corporate Plan, while also ensuring prudent use of available finances,” they said.
The housing delivery team are responsible for the design, planning and management of the construction of new social, affordable purchase and cost rental schemes as well as estate regeneration, they said.
The design of the schemes is carried out by internal teams within Dublin City Council and by procured external integrated design teams, said the spokesperson. “All construction is procured and provided by external contractors.”
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
“You simply cannot just say you're putting out a phone when really what you're actually doing is you're putting out a massive advertising board.”
The site "is in the direct eye line of the [Dublin City Council] chief executive’s office”, says Green Party Councillor Janet Horner.
A crowd of about 40 people gathered on Saturday for the unveiling of a plaque honouring Leo Rowsome, on a house where he used to live.
Next step: a workshop in September to try to discuss the nuts and bolts of the proposal.
