The greatest hoarder of vacant properties in this country is the State itself
What do the housing crisis and the Leinster House bikeshed fiasco have in common? They are two examples of this Government’s inability to deliver key public infrastructure efficiently.
The €336,000 Leinster House bike shed is just the latest manifestation of the damaging and costly culture of waste within public infrastructure development. The delivery of public housing is similarly stymied by this culture.
Freedom of Information requests sent by Aontú to each local authority have shown, shockingly, that there are 4,000 vacant council-owned houses across the country. To put that in context: there are more vacant houses owned by county councils in Ireland than there are homeless children in the State. The greatest hoarder of vacant properties in the State is the State itself.
On average, it takes eight months to turn around a vacant council house for a new tenant. It takes three weeks on average to turn around a private rental property to house a new family.
Why is there a difference? Because a private landlord cannot afford to leave their house empty for eight months. In response to my FoI requests, one local authority with 127 vacant houses told me it costs on average €25,000 to repair and reintroduce each property. This means for a cost of just €100m we could introduce 4,000 public council houses into the system.
The human cost of these empty homes is incredible. The physical and mental health of homeless families is seriously impacted. The ability of children to study, socialise and even to receive proper nutrition is all negatively affected. If these homes were reintroduced to the housing sector in the same time frame as private rentals, well over 3,500 homeless families could be rehomed.
Focus Ireland estimates that the cost of accommodating each homeless person a year is €34,000. There are 14,429 people in Ireland officially homeless. That’s a population larger than the town of Killarney. The State is spending well over €450m a year on homeless accommodation and damaging people’s lives and wasting hundreds of millions of euro in the process.
There are at least 86,000 vacant private homes in Ireland. Many main streets outside the commuter belt are littered with empty homes. These vacant homes stand testament to the two separate economies that exist in Ireland.
The Government has finally introduced a vacant property refurbishment grant. In the first 18 months of the scheme, a mere €4.3m was spent, amounting to five or six vacant houses brought back to use every month.
At this rate, it would take the Government more than 1,000 years to bring every vacant home back into use. The design of this grant is flawed. It’s far too difficult to draw down.
The Government has spent €2.2bn on a children’s hospital that is still not complete. It has spent €300m on the Metro North project without putting a shovel in the ground. It spent €22m on ventilators that did not work during Covid which are now being stored at an annual cost of thousands of euro.
Flood defences in Midleton in Cork were promised by the Government after Storm Frank in 2015. The planning application for those flood defences has still not been submitted despite the life-threatening flood in Midleton last year. One hundred and thirty new electric buses lay idle for more than a year because no one applied for planning permission for the charging infrastructure. The Government allows 4,000 council houses to lay idle and the Office of Public Works spend €336,000 on a bikeshed.
What is the common denominator in all of this? In the political system and in the upper levels of the civil service, no one is held to account. No one loses their jobs. Until there are consequences about the massive waste of taxpayers’ money, there will be no change. We will be cursed to read these headlines over and over again.
Peadar Tóibín is a TD for Meath West and the leader of Aontú