DUBLIN, Jan. 1 (Xinhua) -- House prices in Ireland went up by an average of 8.4 percent in 2017, according to the statistics released here on Monday.

Sherry FitzGerald, the largest property advisory firm in Ireland, said on its website that the figure represented a 3.2-percentage-point increase over the previous year's figure of 5.2 percent.

The biggest rise was recorded on the housing market of Dublin, the capital of Ireland, which witnessed an 8.8 percent increase over a year ago, said the company.

Significant increases were also registered in three other major cities of the country, namely Galway, Limerick and Cork, which saw a rise of 8.4 percent, 7.4 percent and 7.3 percent respectively over 2016, it said.

Marian Finnegan, chief economist of Sherry FitzGerald, attributed the rapid house price rise mainly to a strong domestic economy, increase of employment and shortage of supply.

Ireland's economy for 2017 is widely predicted to grow by about 4.8 percent and its official figure for long-term unemployment (people out of work for more than a year) has dropped to about 3 percent.

Commenting on the 2018 market, Finnegan believed that the help-to-buy scheme introduced by the Irish government will continue to help stabilize the prices of new homes in the country, especially in Dublin. However, She said the prices of the established housing market in the country will continue to grow by 6 to 8 percent in 2018.

The help-to-buy scheme was introduced by the Irish government in July 2016 in a bid to curb the soaring prices of the local housing market by encouraging property developers to build more houses for self-use purposes rather than trade-up purposes.

Since the introduction of the scheme, the new home prices in Dublin only witnessed just one percent increase in the first nine months of 2017, said Finnegan.