In Ringsend, 176 new social homes sit empty due to funding paperwork delays

In Ringsend, a massive new apartment complex has been rising on the old Irish Glass Bottle site, near Sean Moore Park.

While metal fencing still cordoned off most of the site on Monday, the space outside the apartment block known as Lime House was open to roam.

It looked ready for its first occupants.

Each balcony had a pair of deck chairs. Fresh mattresses were in all of the visible bedrooms. On the ground floor, a co-working office space was up and running. 

The new development’s website is already offering prospective residents a chance to book viewings to rent this building’s 212 flats.

However, another nearby building, Glass House (or, Block M), remains closed off, even if it looked like it was ready to go too. This block is meant to host 176 social homes.

These homes are being acquired by Co-operative Housing Ireland (CHI), an approved housing body, a spokesperson for the council said on Monday.

But that’s held up by the process of getting funding from the Department of Housing to pay for the new homes, said council executive manager Ruth Dowling, at a meeting of the South East Area Committee on 9 March.

Those apartments can’t be advertised to potential tenants – and occupied – until the funding application has been approved, Dowling said.

It’s frustrating, said Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey on Friday. Local councillors had been led to believe that the process of allocating the 176 social homes would have started around January. 

“Now there seems to be this delay, and it seems to be largely a paperwork delay,” Lacey said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing did not respond when asked on Friday what was causing the delay.

A spokesperson for the council said they could not provide any precise timeline on when it can get tenants moved in.

New social housing

The development of the 37-acre Irish Glass Bottle site is being led by Ronan Group Real Estate and Lioncor.

The site has room for an estimated 3,500 new homes eventually, according to the council’s planning scheme report from April 2019.

As part of this project, Dublin City Council in March 2022 granted Pembroke Beach DAC permission to proceed with the first phase of the site’s redevelopment: the construction of 570 apartments.

In November 2025, the Minister for Housing James Browne said the council and Pembroke Beach DAC had concluded negotiations for a “Part V” agreement on the site for three of the phases – in other words, for the council to buy some of the housing there, for use as social housing.

This agreement between the council and Pembroke Beach was for 176 homes in a single block to be designated as social housing, which would be acquired by an approved housing body, Browne said.

That same day back in November, Labour leader Ivana Bacik TD posted a video to her Instagram saying that the homes in Block M – or Glass House – would be ready for families and individuals on the housing waiting list from February 2026.

There were 1,674 households on the council’s social housing and transfer lists in the area covering Ringsend, which also covers City Quay, Irishtown, Donnybrook, Pearse Street and Mount Street, according to a January 2024 council report. 

Delayed

At the council committee meeting on Monday, 9 March, Dowling, the council’s executive manager for housing delivery, acknowledged that there’d been a delay.

It is CHI that is supposed to buy the 176 homes in the Glass Bottle development, which the council would then put tenants from its social housing list into – and the approved housing body would be the property manager. 

And as part of this, the council and CHI have an application in for the Capital Advance Leasing Funding (CALF) via the Department of Housing. 

The council had expected Block M to be tenanted during the first quarter of this year, Dowling, the executive manager for the council’s housing delivery division told the South-East Area committee meeting on 9 March.

But, that timeline has been pushed back. 

“We are back and forth with the Department,” Dowling said. “Unfortunately, at the moment, there is a bit of back and forth with the Department just clarifying issues in relation to the CALF application for CHI.”

The council is working with the department to resolve those issues, Dowling said. In the meantime, the council can’t use those apartments, she said.

A spokesperson for Co-operative Housing Ireland, on Monday, did not comment when asked for clarity on what exactly is behind the delays with the application for CALF funding.

As the council had provided comment, their spokesperson said only that they are looking forward to delivering these new social rental homes in partnership with the council and department.

Lacey, the Labour councillor, said he didn’t understand why the council couldn’t be the direct manager of these instead of Co-operative Housing Ireland.

“We’re told every day of the week that the government has made loads of money available and that there’s going to be no obstacles,” Lacey said. 

“And yet this hold-up of allocating a very welcome 176 housing units are delayed because of bureaucracy at departmental levels,” he said.