A Halifax survey looking at the affordability of housing for Ireland's key public sector workers has found the situation is still very difficult for the vast majority.

The downturn in the housing market has seen a slight improvement in the major cities, but public sector workers in rural Ireland are continuing to see a decline in affordability.

The annual survey, first published last year, looks at the average salaries of key public sector workers, i.e. Gardai­, secondary & primary teachers, fire fighters and nurses. These salaries are then compared to second hand house prices in the major cities of Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Waterford, as well as locations outside of those cities.

As with the survey last year, fire fighters and nurses are still the worst affected key workers. Even though their situation has eased slightly from last year, average house prices are still over 13 times the average salaries for those workers in Dublin.

-- Advertisement --

For a house in Dublin to be deemed affordable for a nurse, the average house price would have to be €171,000; against the actual average house price of €473,479. Even for Gardai­ and secondary teachers in Dublin an affordable house price would need to be €260,000.

Limerick and Waterford are the two most affordable cities with only Gardai­ and secondary teachers in Limerick deemed to find housing affordable. Dublin is the least affordable city, followed by Cork and then Galway.

With the correction in house prices in the first half of this year, affordability in the major cities for all key workers has improved since the same time last year with the biggest improvement felt in Dublin, followed by Cork. Only the smaller towns and more rural areas of Ireland have seen housing affordability decline as they have been less affected by the house price correction.

Commenting on this year's statistics, Gabriel Bannigan, Head of Retail & Intermediary Banking at Halifax, said: "We have naturally seen an improvement in housing affordability for our key public sector workers due to the correction in house prices, which is a welcome sign. Having said that, affordability is still an issue for many key workers continually being priced out of the market, particularly in Dublin and Cork.

"Even though the Government has pledged more new affordable and social housing units, this is bound to be impacted by the slowdown in house building in Ireland. We need to look at other ways, such as payment schemes, to ease the burden as a banking industry in conjunction with the Government."

Earnings data used within the research has been taken from the Central Statistics Office Publication "Public Sector Employment and Earnings" along with data from the Report of the Public Sector Benchmarking body 2002 and supplemented by wage agreement data from the Irish Nurses Organisation.

(GK/JM)