Ireland Housing Minister James Browne used the Ireland Pavilion at real estate show MIPIM to tell international investors the country needs their capital if it is to meet its ambitious housing targets.

Speaking at a stand outside the Palais des Festivals in Cannes on 10 March — the second time Ireland has attended MIPIM as a country and the first with a dedicated pavilion — Browne said Ireland will need international capital if it is to meet its housing goals over the remainder of the decade.

He added that the government believes a series of policy changes introduced over the past year has improved the investment proposition.

Browne told delegates in France that after becoming housing minister in January, he had initially spent time assessing sector challenges rather than immediately introducing new policies. Since then, the government has implemented a range of measures designed to support development and address supply constraints, he added.

Local authorities have been instructed to make more zoned land available in their development plans, while legislation allowing rents to reset to market levels when a tenancy changes hands was passed into law earlier in March. The government has also revised national and regional housing targets through an updated National Planning Framework.

The government’s updated National Development Plan has also outlined investment of €165B through 2030, and, in a separate initiative, the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce has been tasked with addressing bottlenecks in delivery, including efforts to limit the judicial review challenges that delay major projects.

“We are keen to create the environment for capital to be deployed at scale in Ireland," co-speaker and Housing, Local Government and Heritage Secretary General Graham Doyle said.

"We have a target to deliver 300,000 new homes by 2030, and we are putting our shoulders to the wheel to make that happen. International investment is critical," he added.

That figure should be viewed as a floor rather than a ceiling for the government’s ambitions, Browne said, as he stressed that despite the scale of public spending, the state cannot fund the required housing programme alone.

The government plans to allocate more than €9B to housing in 2026, including €5.2B in direct exchequer funding alongside investment from the Land Development Agency and lending from the Housing Finance Agency.

However, a report published last year for Property Industry Ireland forecast that building more than 50,000 homes every year would need about €28B annually in land and development funding, including around €24B of additional investment capital.

The Ireland Pavilion at MIPIM hosted a number of presentations and discussions across the event and was backed by companies including A&L Goodbody, AIB, Ardstone, Avenue Capital Group, Bank of Ireland, Cairn Homes, Evara, Glenveagh, Ires REIT, Kennedy Wilson, KPMG, Lioncor, Matheson, and McCann FitzGerald.