It’s 7.40 on a grey Tuesday morning, and the lift on the fifth floor arrives with a soft ding. Inside: a man in cycling gear clutching a helmet, a woman balancing a flat white and a laptop bag, and a toddler in a buggy who studies everyone with the frank curiosity only toddlers get away with. Someone says “Morning.” Someone else says “Grand, yeah.” The doors close, the numbers tick down, and for thirty seconds five strangers share two square metres of Dublin in companionable silence.
Multiply that scene by a few thousand buildings and you have one of the quietest revolutions in the city’s recent history. Dublin, long defined by red-brick terraces, semi-ds and the eternal dream of a back garden, has been learning to live upstairs.
The numbers behind the boom
The figures are hard to argue with. According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO), 36,284 new dwellings were completed in Ireland in 2025, up 20.4% on 2024 and the highest annual total since the series began in 2011.
The bigger story is what kind of homes they were. CSO data for 2025 shows 12,047 apartments completed last year, a third (33.2%) of all new homes, up from 8,687 (28.8%) in 2024. Go back to 2019 and apartments made up just 16.3% of completions, or 3,427 units. In six years, the share has roughly doubled.
And the capital is doing most of the heavy lifting. Dublin accounted for nearly 10,000 apartment completions in 2025 (9,623, according to the CSO), around 80% of the national total. Dublin City alone added 4,325. That’s a lot of new front doors, most of them several floors above the footpath.
A city of shared hallways
Living vertically changes the small rhythms of a day, and Dubliners are adapting with characteristic good humour.
Take deliveries. In a terraced house, a parcel lands on the doorstep. In an apartment block, it becomes a small logistical drama involving intercoms, parcel lockers and the occasional courier wandering the third-floor corridor calling out a surname. The lift is busier at lunchtime than you’d think, ferrying grocery bags, takeaways and the odd suspiciously large box from an online furniture sale.
Then there are the bikes. Dublin’s cycling culture didn’t vanish when people moved upstairs; it just started taking the lift. Anyone who has squeezed in beside a commuter bike, front wheel angled carefully away from their good trousers, knows the choreography involved.
Neighbours are different too. You may never borrow a cup of sugar, but you’ll know who has the beagle, who’s training for the marathon and who’s always running late for the Luas. The lift is where those micro-relationships happen: a nod, a comment about the weather, a shared groan when someone presses every button on the way up.
And moving day? Moving day is when the lift becomes the most important piece of infrastructure in your life. Sofa dimensions are measured against lift doors with the intensity of an engineering exam. Residents negotiate time slots. Mattresses travel upright. Somebody always ends up taking the stairs.
What keeps a building moving
For something used dozens or even hundreds of times a day, the lift gets remarkably little thought, until it stops. Then a fourth-floor flat suddenly feels very far from the street, especially for older residents, parents with buggies, people with limited mobility or anyone carrying the weekly shop.
That’s why regular lift maintenance matters so much in an apartment block. A lift combines mechanical, electrical and electronic parts (motors, doors, sensors, controls and safety devices) all working under constant use. In general terms, a healthy routine means scheduled visits from qualified technicians, checks on doors and safety systems, attention to wear before it turns into a breakdown, and clear records of what was done and when. Older lifts may eventually need upgrading to keep pace with the buildings and residents they serve.
Responsibility often sits with the owners’ management company, and not every committee has it front of mind. In June 2025, the Irish Lift and Escalator Association (ILEA) said many owners’ management companies are unaware of their responsibilities for lift maintenance and safety, as reported by Building Ireland magazine.
Where Dubliners can turn
For residents and management companies looking for lift servicing in Dublin, there are specialist companies working across the city. FAIN Ireland is one example: it has a Dublin branch in Tallaght, Dublin 24, services lifts of different brands, and offers maintenance, upgrades and installation, including in buildings that don’t yet have a lift. It also runs a 24-hour telephone service, the kind of detail you appreciate most when a lift decides to take an unscheduled day off.
The practical takeaway is simple: know who looks after your building’s lift, know how to report a fault, and if you sit on a management committee, make sure maintenance is on the agenda rather than an afterthought.
Giving the lift its due
Dublin is growing upwards, and the numbers suggest it isn’t stopping any time soon. New blocks keep rising across the city, bringing new neighbours, new routines and new reasons to say “Morning” to someone you’ve never properly met.
Through it all, the humble lift keeps doing its job: carrying bikes, buggies, shopping, sofas and sleepy commuters up and down, day after day, with barely a thank you. Next time the doors slide open on the first try, it might deserve a small nod of appreciation. In a city learning to live upstairs, it’s the one neighbour everyone relies on.
