The Living City Initiative tax incentive for the refurbishment of older houses – extended in Budget 2026 – attracted just 242 applications in Dublin city in a decade, new figures show.
The scheme, designed to regenerate the historic core of cities, has been available in Dublin city since 2015 and allowed owners of houses that were at least 100 years old to claim tax relief for their refurbishment, at a rate of 10 per cent per year for 10 years, against their income.
Despite this, uptake of the living city initiative has been extremely low. The scheme was amended in Budget 2017 to include landlords and restrictions on floor sizes were removed, yet there remained very little uptake in the area covered by the scheme in Dublin city.
The scheme applies in a designated “special regeneration area”, which includes most of the retail and commercial districts in the city centre, as well as the Liberties, Smithfield, and the northeast inner city, and a number of prominent arterial routes leading to the city such as Cork Street, Clanbrassil Street and Richmond Street on the southside, and Prussia Street, Church Street and Dorset Street on the northside.
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Since 2015 Dublin City Council has received just 242 applications for the scheme and just 141 renovation projects have been completed. To date this year, only 12 applications have been made to the council.
Speaking at the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland conference in Dublin recently, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the scheme, which was introduced under a Fine Gael and Labour coalition government, was being expanded and would be made “far more usable” under Budget 2026.
“The original living city initiative programme, whoever designed it, must have had an objective of making sure it didn’t work,” Mr Martin said.
The scheme is being extended to the end of 2030 and expanded to cover properties built before 1975 instead of 1915. For businesses, but not owner-occupiers, maximum relief available will be increased from €200,000 to €300,000. In the coming years the scheme will be extended from Dublin and regional cities to Athlone, Drogheda, Dundalk, Letterkenny and Sligo.
Dublin Civic Trust chief executive Graham Hickey said the “shockingly poor” uptake was partly due to confusion over what sector of the housing market it was intended to serve.
“It suffered from a branding problem from the start, a lack of clarity as to who is the intended audience; is it investors or is it homeowners? In Dublin city I think there needs to be a recognition that it is the commercial market that runs the show, and we need a scheme that is attractive to them.”
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Increasing the maximum cost of works to €300,000 was an improvement, but still a “drop in the ocean” when it came to refurbishing historic buildings in Dublin, he said.
“It is wholly insufficient because one of the challenges with properly refurbishing typical four-storey 18th- and 19th-century buildings in Dublin city is the scale of the investment required; €300,000 as a maximum credit is a drop in the ocean of what’s needed,” Mr Hickey said.
“There’s an inferred expectation that these are going to be low-quality refurbishments. Working to best practice standards, to provide high-quality residential accommodation, you’re talking €3 million-€4 million. The expectation would be this will result in quick refurbs for bedsits or bunk beds.”
He was also concerned that extending the relief to buildings constructed before 1975 would “encourage more capital to flow towards newer, easier to refurbish structures”.
The scheme might be better suited to use in regional towns, Mr Hickey said.
“I think it’s a scheme that probably will be better matched in regional towns and areas outside Dublin where building costs are more realistic, and it’s more likely to be owner-occupiers doing it. In the case of Dublin city centre it is the commercial market that dominates and the schemes need to reflect that.”
