01 · Price
What a home costs
€399,999median price paid, 12 months to July 2026 (CSO)
The CSO’s Residential Property Price Index puts the median price of a home bought in the year to July 2026 at €399,999, with prices up 5.5% in a year. In Dublin the median was €500,000. The spread across the country is wide: the cheapest Eircode area was F45 (Castlerea, Co Roscommon) at €158,500, and the dearest was A94 (Blackrock, Co Dublin) at €850,500.
The other side
Price growth is slowing. The annual rate has eased every few months through 2026, from 7.0% in January to 5.5% in July, according to the CSO’s monthly releases.
02 · Rent
Renting is no escape
€1,839average monthly rent for a new tenancy, Q1 2026 (RTB)
The RTB’s index puts the average rent for a new tenancy at €1,839 a month nationally, 9.1% higher than a year earlier. Twelve months of that is €22,068, before bills. New national rent rules took effect on 1 March 2026, capping increases on existing tenancies, and their effect on new rents will take time to show.
03 · Waiting
A generation at home
1 in 3people aged 25–29 living with their parents, Census 2022 (CSO)
On Census night 2022, one in three people aged 25 to 29 were living in their parents’ home, up from 24% in 2011. For many, staying at home is the only way to save a deposit.
04 · Shelter
No front door at all
17,885people in emergency accommodation, August 2026 (Dept of Housing)
A record 17,885 people were in state-funded emergency accommodation in August 2026, including 5,830 children. The official count does not include people sleeping rough, in domestic violence refuges, or on friends’ sofas, so the true number is higher.
05 · Building
More homes than in any year since 2011
36,284new homes completed in 2025 (CSO)
The CSO counted 36,284 new homes completed in 2025, up 20.4% on 2024 and the highest since its series began in 2011. Apartments drove the growth, with 12,047 completed, up 38.7%. More than half of all completions were in Dublin and the surrounding counties.
06 · The gap
The pace the plan needs
≈52,700homes a year needed from 2026 to 2030 to reach 300,000 (DáilDex calculation)
The Government’s plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities 2025–2030, published in November 2025, targets 300,000 homes by 2030. The plan covers 2025, so we counted that year’s 36,284 completions towards it. That leaves 263,716 homes for the five years from 2026 to 2030: about 52,700 a year, or roughly 16,500 a year more than Ireland built in 2025.
This is our calculation from the official figures, not a Government number, and we show the working in the film. Other analyses spread the target over the five years 2026 to 2030 and arrive at 60,000 a year; either way, completions need to climb by at least 45% and stay there.
Ireland is building more than it has in 15 years, and still not enough to meet its own target.
Where the decisions are made
Rent rules, planning law and the housing budget are each passed by a vote in the Dáil, by 174 TDs. That is the point of the film’s last scene, and the reason DáilDex exists. You can follow your TDs and see how they vote on every housing bill, with the official record linked each time.
How we made the film
Our earlier films were built from typography and motion alone, with music and no voice. For Locked Out we wanted a narrated documentary, without it looking or sounding generic. Here is how the production worked, and what we learned.
The voice sets the clock
We wrote and fact-checked the script first, one line per scene, then recorded it with an Irish narrator voice from ElevenLabs. The recording comes back with a timestamp for every character, so every scene, every number and every caption is timed from the voice: when the narrator says “seventeen thousand”, the counter starts on that word. If we change a line, only that scene is re-recorded and the whole film re-times itself.
Getting “Dáil” right
Text-to-speech voices mispronounce Irish words. Our first draft, with a stand-in voice, said “DáilDex” wrong. We now keep a small pronunciation list (Dáil is spoken as “Doyle”, TDs as “T.D.s”) that changes what the narrator reads but not what the captions show. Then every take is transcribed back by a speech-to-text model and checked automatically. If an Irish word comes back wrong, we know before anyone hears it.
Generated imagery, used sparingly
Five illustrations (a Georgian front door, a childhood bedroom, a hotel corridor, cranes at dawn and Leinster House) were generated with Recraft in one art direction: painterly, blue-black, one warm light, no faces and no text, with the left third left empty for our type. Two of them were turned into five-second motion shots with Seedance. That is about 45% of the running time. The rest is designed data graphics, and every figure carries its source on screen. The film’s credits say which parts are AI-generated.
Sound
The score is original, synthesised in the browser and scored to the narration: a ticker when a number counts, a low hit on the title, chords that change with each scene. The music drops under the voice automatically whenever the narrator speaks.
What it cost
About US$3.60 for the generated stills and motion shots, plus narration. Everything is cached, so re-timing, re-voicing and re-rendering the film cost nothing further.
Sources
More from DáilDex
- The Waiting Generation: eight issues facing young people in Ireland, by the numbers.
- Ask Dex: “how did my TDs vote on the rent changes?”
- All DáilDex films
— The DáilDex team