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Ireland's tallest building is coming, and it won't have a single private market-rate unit. The 102-metre Parkgate Pointe tower will anchor a state-backed cost-rental scheme near Heuston Station, landing in the same week as a genuinely strong set of results from one of Dublin's largest private homebuilders. By Elizabeth Plum / Published: Sep 14 2026, 10:51 AM EDT Ireland's tallest building is set to rise beside Dublin's Heuston Station as the centerpiece of a 562-home development, according to Bisnow and multiple Irish outlets covering the same announcement. Construction is due to begin within weeks on the Parkgate Street site, a former textile warehouse across the River Liffey from the station, with completion expected in late 2029. The scale is worth stating precisely. The centerpiece tower, Parkgate Pointe, will rise 30 storeys to 102 metres, containing 198 apartments, making it taller than Belfast's 85-metre Obel Tower and Cork's in-development 85.53-metre Railyard building, the country's current tallest structures, according to the Irish Times. Three additional interconnected blocks, ranging from 10 to 13 storeys, will provide the remaining 364 homes. It's worth being precise about what kind of housing this actually is, since "affordable housing" doesn't fully capture the specific model involved. All 562 homes will be delivered as cost-rental housing, owned by the State's Land Development Agency and made available through the government's cost-rental scheme, a distinct tenure where rents are set to cover the cost of building and maintaining the homes rather than being either full market-rate or deeply subsidized in the traditional sense. None of the units will be sold as private market-rate apartments. The scheme is being delivered through the LDA's Project Tosaigh programme, which partners the state agency with private developers, in this case Castlethorn, with John Paul Construction serving as lead contractor. The project is expected to cost close to €220 million to build, and Dublin City Council granted planning permission last year. Housing Minister James Browne said the delivery of the new homes "is critical to see these much-needed new homes for Dublin progressing and located in the heart of the city, where we want people to live." This development is explicitly framed as only the first phase of a much larger transformation. The LDA and Córas Iompair Éireann, Ireland's national transport body, have signed a memorandum of understanding to progress a phased, mixed-use master plan for the wider area around Heuston Station, encompassing additional homes, offices, retail and public amenities, alongside a new boardwalk and cycle bridge connecting the station to Phoenix Park. This Heuston-area scheme lands within about a week of Cairn Homes, one of Ireland's largest listed homebuilders, reporting a genuinely strong set of results and raising its own guidance. Cairn posted first-half 2026 revenue of €455.5 million, up 60% year-over-year, driven by a 61% increase in home sales, and used those results to upgrade its full-year 2026 guidance to roughly €1.08 billion in revenue and €180 million to €185 million in operating profit, alongside a €50 million share buyback and a 10% increase to its interim dividend, according to the company's own results announcement. Cairn is separately targeting delivery of around 6,000 homes across 2026 and 2027 combined. It's worth being direct about a limit here: a separately referenced Dublin story, a roughly €150 million super-prime office listing, could not be independently verified for this piece. Rather than assume that detail checks out without confirmation, it's left out of this comparison, which instead relies on the two data points that do hold up clearly. What that combination does support, based on confirmed data, is genuine momentum across two different parts of Dublin's housing market simultaneously right now: a large, state-backed cost-rental scheme anchored by the country's tallest building on one side, and strong private-sector homebuilder performance with upgraded growth targets on the other. That's a real, two-part signal worth noting, even without a third confirmed data point to round it out further. The broader housing-need context is worth including for scale. Ireland needs roughly 93,000 new homes a year to meet demand through 2031, according to a report from stockbroker Davy, considerably above the government's own Programme for Government target of 300,000 homes between 2025 and 2030, itself equivalent to roughly 60,000 homes annually. As of July 2026, 17,527 people were officially recorded as homeless in Ireland. That gap between stated need, government targets, and actual delivery is the backdrop against which both this week's Heuston Quarter announcement and Cairn's own growth trajectory are unfolding. The clearest things to watch next are construction progress at Parkgate Street toward its late-2029 completion target, and whether Cairn Homes and other Dublin-area developers continue reporting comparably strong results through the rest of 2026, which would offer further confirmation that this week's overlap reflects genuine, sustained momentum rather than a coincidental timing of two unrelated announcements. Join the Discussion EDITOR'S PICKS

Dexcom - project completion. Date: March 30, 2026 John Paul Construction Limited is pleased to mark the completion of the Dexcom Medical Devices Facility, a state of the art manufacturing and office development delivered over a 25-month programme. The facility includes a highly technical production environment with cleanrooms, supporting laboratory and engineering spaces, alongside a four-storey office building. As Dexcom's first manufacturing facility outside of the United States, the project represents a significant milestone for the company's global expansion. Once operational, it will develop and manufacture real time continuous glucose monitoring systems, supporting diabetes management, and improving patient outcomes globally. This project was particularly important to its team, reflecting its capability in delivering complex, high specification life sciences facilities, with a strong focus on quality, safety, and programme certainty. From a sustainability perspective, the project excavated and successfully retained 170,000m^3 of subsoil and topsoil, planted 600 native Irish Oak trees as part of the Athenry Tidy Towns initiative, and is submitting for LEED Gold certification. A strong local supply chain was also central to the success of the project, supporting both delivery and the wider regional economy. Dexcom has been a valued client throughout, and John Paul Construction Limited appreciate the trust placed in John Paul Construction Limited to deliver this significant investment. John Paul Construction Limited would like to thank the design team, its project partners and the wider site team for their commitment and professionalism in bringing this project to completion.