Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire
Question:42. Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire asked the Minister for Rural and Community Development for an update on her Department’s plans to address dereliction and vacancy in rural towns and villages. [10548/24]
View answerTuesday, 5 March 2024
Questions (42)
Oral answers (6 contributions)
I ask the Minister for an update on the Department's plans to address dereliction and vacancy in rural towns. As someone who regularly travels to Dublin away matches, I often pass through small towns where I see a great deal of dereliction, with many unoccupied buildings throughout rural Ireland. It can be shocking to see the extent of some of the dereliction, particularly during a housing crisis. I would like an update on the measures being taken to encourage the revitalisation of rural Ireland to support activities and projects focusing on town centre regeneration.
The town centre first policy is a major cross-government policy that aims to tackle vacancy, combat dereliction and breathe new life into our town centres. It supports the our rural future policy for a thriving rural Ireland.
Last week, I attended the national town centre first day with my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Kieran O’Donnell, where I announced the second round of towns that will be provided funding to complete a town centre first plan. This funding is part of a new suite of supports I recently announced, providing €4.5 million to support broader efforts to regenerate town centres through a bottom-up approach. On the day, I was delighted to have the opportunity to meet town regeneration officers, whose roles are funded by my Department, and members of town centre first teams from across the country to discuss with them the efforts they are making at local level to support the development of their towns.
Central to town centre first is the range of support funding in place, including my Department’s rural regeneration and development fund and the town and village renewal scheme. Both schemes have already delivered landmark projects which tackle issues of vacancy and dereliction across rural Ireland. Both schemes have also recently completed calls for new applications, and I expect to make further funding announcements on foot of these applications in the coming months. I am aware that the challenges of vacancy and dereliction feature prominently in the applications received under these schemes, so I look forward to announcing support for more high-quality projects shortly.
In the last two years, I have also rolled out the new building acquisition measure to support local authorities to purchase vacant and derelict buildings for future development for community purposes. More than €10 million has been provided to date to support local authorities to purchase 53 vacant and derelict buildings. This initiative will see vacant properties such as bank buildings, courthouses, and Garda stations redeveloped as community facilities across rural Ireland.
Additional information not given on the floor of the House
My Department remains absolutely committed to addressing the issues of vacancy and dereliction in our rural towns and to the success of the town centre first policy in delivering on the goal of revitalising our rural towns and villages making them better places to live, work, visit and invest in.
It is important that we look at the issue of vacancy and dereliction. The bottom-up approach is critically important to all of this. The issue has to be community-led and sustainable into the future. Simply dressing up buildings will not be sufficient. It is about bringing life back into rural towns and communities and improving the lives of people. It is also about dealing with the housing crisis. We need to look at the villages and towns that have derelict homes. That should occur in the middle of a housing crisis. We should use compulsory purchase orders much more. We will have to look at that for the future. If a developer or someone else with a building or row of houses is waiting for the price of the development to build up, compulsory purchase needs to be actioned much more quickly.
A lot of work is being done across government to bring vacant and derelict buildings back into use. I am very much in favour of the bottom-up approach. That is why we have the town centre first officers. They will engage with the different stakeholders in the towns to get a unified approach, decide what their priorities are and get the applications in. In my Department, the focus is on utilising those buildings that are not really suitable for housing and can be converted for community use. I introduced the buildings acquisitions measure. We gave funding to local authorities to purchase the buildings which they identified with local groups that could be converted for community use. We all know that lots of things can be done with these old buildings, whether it be for Men's Sheds or local community groups that want facilities and meeting rooms. They can also be used as enterprise centres and remote working hubs.
I reiterate that the concept of bottom-up is not new, but the idea has been lost over a number of years. I welcome that there is a focus on this idea, but the fact that there are substantial numbers of derelict buildings still in existence in the middle of the housing crisis is entirely puzzling, or maybe it is not puzzling given that insufficient action has been taken over the past five or six years to bring these buildings back into use.
The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, under the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, provides the vacant home refurbishment grant of up to €70,000. There is huge demand for this scheme. I have already seen houses that have been lying idle for years being renovated.
It is great to see that because many of them already have services there. There is the vacant property tax, which is still there. The Department of housing also has vacant home officers in the local authorities and is leading other schemes, such as the repair and lease scheme and the buy and reuse scheme. Some local authorities have used those schemes to really good effect. The local authority in Waterford in particular has really shown what can be achieved through those schemes. The Department of housing is doing much work in larger towns and cities through the urban regeneration fund and is looking at how we can combat vacancy and dereliction.
I am the same as the Deputy. Sometimes I go through towns and wonder why on earth somebody is not living in those buildings. There are many opportunities for people to get support. I often ask why on Earth a building is not being lived in, but it is probably something to do with probate that is taken out on properties. That is often the reason.