Liam Donohoe Dunne
In 2026, the median price of a home sold in County Roscommon stands at approximately €240,000, according to up-to-date figures from HousePrice.ie.
Go back a decade and the picture was very different. CSO figures published in early 2017 put the median price paid for a home in Roscommon over the preceding 12 months at approximately €75,000.
The figures should not be treated as a formal measure of house-price inflation, as the mix of properties sold changes over time. But they illustrate a wider point: the cost facing someone trying to establish a home in the county has changed dramatically over the space of a decade.
So, with this in mind, how much could it cost a couple or family to buy and run a home in County Roscommon today?
Assuming a couple want to settle down in Roscommon and purchase a house for €240,000, they would generally need a minimum deposit of 10 per cent, or €24,000.
For first-time buyers, Central Bank mortgage rules generally allow borrowing of up to four times gross household income. A couple seeking the remaining €216,000 would therefore need a combined gross income of at least €54,000, subject to the lender’s own affordability assessment.
For second and subsequent buyers, the limit is generally 3.5 times gross income, meaning the income requirement would be higher.
And that is only to access the credit needed to buy the house.
Assuming a €216,000 mortgage over 30 years at an interest rate of around 3.5 per cent, repayments would amount to approximately €970 a month — or about €11,640 a year.
Then come the costs of actually running the home. Using typical national electricity and gas consumption as a rough guide, household energy bills can add more than €3,000 a year. The precise figure will vary greatly, particularly in Roscommon, where many homes are heated by oil, electricity or solid fuel rather than natural gas.
That brings the rough mortgage-and-energy bill for our €240,000 example to almost €15,000 a year. And even that is far from the full cost of living in County Roscommon. It does not include food, transport, insurance, Local Property Tax, home maintenance, childcare or the many other expenses faced by a household.
Go back to 2016 and the picture was markedly different. Taking a €75,000 house price as a simple comparison, a 10 per cent deposit would leave a mortgage of €67,500. Applying the same 30-year term and 3.5 per cent interest rate would result in repayments of approximately €303 per month, or about €3,640 a year.
CSO figures show that the median residential electricity bill in Roscommon in 2016 was €913, while the median gas bill for households connected to the gas network was €759.
On that illustrative basis, the combined mortgage-and-energy figure would have been approximately €5,300 a year, compared with almost €15,000 in our present-day example.
It is not a formal cost-of-living index, and the figures depend heavily on the type of house, mortgage, heating system and household involved. But they give some indication of the scale of the pressure now facing people attempting to buy and maintain a home.
So what has driven the increase?
A major factor is the continuing imbalance between demand for housing and the supply of suitable homes. Ireland’s population has grown, employment has remained strong and demand for housing has increased, while the supply of homes in many areas has struggled to keep pace.
When more buyers compete for a limited number of properties, upward pressure on prices follows.
It is not all doom and gloom, however. Increasing the supply of housing remains one of the clearest ways of easing that pressure. That means examining barriers to construction, the planning process, infrastructure and the viability of new developments, while ensuring homes are built where they are actually needed.
There are lessons from the past too. Ireland’s pre-2008 experience demonstrated the dangers not simply of building houses, but of allowing a credit-fuelled property bubble, speculative development and excessive exposure by the banking system to take hold.
The challenge now is different: increasing housing supply in a sustainable way, without repeating the mistakes of the previous property boom. Hopefully, with the right balance, the tide can begin to turn.
