Derelict homes have potential to ease waiting list, TD claims

The Government has been urged to allocate some of the €300m social housing funding announced last week towards renovating derelict private homes and renting them from their owners.

It’s a move that could take people off the waiting lists for local authority housing much more quickly than building new houses, Galway West Independent TD Noel Grealish said yesterday.

He welcomed the Government’s announcement of a social housing strategy that committed to the provision of 35,000 additional social housing units at a cost of €3.8 billion over the next 6 years, with an immediate allocation of €300m, half of which will come from the European Investment Bank.

“But even if we started tomorrow morning the process of building houses, it could actually be four or five years before you could turn a key – by the time you’d go through the whole planning process and construction, it would be at least three years.

“However, there are 90,000 people on the waiting lists for local authority housing nationwide and they can’t wait that long to get a roof over their heads. Something needs to be done immediately,” said Deputy Grealish.

He said a very cost effective partial solution would be a grants scheme to help renovate private houses lying vacant at the moment, rent them from their owners and allocate them to people in need of a home.

“If you travel the countryside in Galway and indeed all over the country, you will see a lot of derelict houses, particularly old farm houses that are lying vacant. Their elderly owners may have died and left the property to their children, who cannot afford to do them up, so they are just lying there vacant.

“I am suggesting that the Government brings forward a scheme to help people do up these houses – it mightn’t cost a lot, maybe between €10,000 and €20,000, to bring them up to a standard where people could actually move into them and we could take a lot of people off the housing waiting list.

Deputy Grealish said that the scheme would offer the bonus of breathing new life into the rural countryside and boost declining rural communities.

“It’s a scheme that could work very successfully for everyone involved. If you went around the country you would find four or five thousand of these houses and a spend of €10 million or €15 million could go a long way.

“It could take a lot of people off the waiting list and it would also stop a lot of these houses from going totally derelict.

“The homes would remain in the hands of their owners, who would commit to renting them for allocation to people on the list for a certain number of years, and during that time get a valuable income stream from something that’s returning nothing at the moment.

“For the Government, it gives them fast access to a pool of housing at a relatively low cost, and for local tradesmen on the Live Register it offers the chance of employment. It’s a win-win situation for everyone,” added Deputy Grealish.