Will more supply fix Mayo’s housing woes?

IT’S the source of almost every river of woe in Ireland, and Mayo is no different.
We’ve long talked about a Strategic Development Zone at Knock Airport that could deliver thousands of jobs.
We talk of expanding our creaking healthcare infrastructure - upgrades for Belmullet and Ballina district hospitals are on the way, as is a badly needed emergency department at Mayo University Hospital.
In Westport, Rice College and the Sacred Heart cannot hold the town’s secondary school-going population. A new school on a greenfield site has been called for - and must be delivered to stop the daily convoy of buses going over and back from Westport to Louisburgh.
We talk about how reopening the Western Rail Corridor can grow our economy and boost our small towns.
But in a county with roughly 120 people in emergency accommodation and around 50 rental properties, where are all the new teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers and their families meant to live?
We talk about protecting Mayo’s tourism product. But what does it say about our housing market when at least two major hotels in the county are understood to have purchased houses for their own staff?
We have a university in our county town. Some feel its potential hasn’t been fully realised and that its range of courses should be expanded.
In October, The Mayo News interviewed a student from Tipperary who, at one point, slept in a van during her first two years in ATU Mayo. There were many more who struggled to find accommodation for the 2024/2025 academic year - many of those then struggled to afford the rent.
In his first interview with this newspaper after being elected a Teachta Dála, Alan Dillon included the expansion of what was then GMIT Castlebar among his list of priorities.
Four-and-a-half years later, he’s the second-most senior elected official in the Department of Housing.
“We’ve seen a huge increase in the number of representations coming through our constituency office as a result,” Minister Dillon told The Mayo News during an interview in that very same office. “And indeed, we have helped many, but supply is the only answer.”

Price increase
IN those four-and-a-half years, the average price of a house in Mayo has gone from around €153,000 to north of €230,000.
The average monthly rent, according to Daft.ie, has almost doubled, rising from €738 to €1,316 - a 4.5 per cent increase in one year.
Nationally and locally, almost every metric is going in the wrong direction - at a time when government spending on housing is at an all-time high.
Minister Dillon insists that supply is the only answer. After troughing during the downturn, supply is certainly on the way up.
Last year, over 500 homes were completed in Mayo. More than 600 have been completed already this year. The number of approved planning permissions for new homes is also up 44 percent.
Mayo County Council is due to exceed its Housing For All target for 2024, with units in Balla (18), Mulranny (16), Belmullet (16), Westport (45), Achill (20), Ballina (over 100), Ballyhaunis, Ballyvary (12), Carnacon (9), Cross (8), Turlough Road Castlebar (33), Ballindine (12) among those coming on stream.
But it seems that no amount of supply can ease the demand fuelled by a booming economy, government schemes for prospective buyers, and the net inward migration of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, international protection applicants and returning Irish immigrants.
Hence why the word ‘affordable’ has been uttered by virtually every politician in Mayo.
Over 1,000 Mayo people have accessed the First Home grant scheme - one which opposition parties and the Central Bank have claimed is further inflating house prices, a claim Minister Dillon refutes.
Hundreds more have been approved for the Croí Cónaithe scheme, where successful applicants can get up to €70,000 to refurbish vacant and derelict properties.
Croí Cónaithe, like the First Home and Help To Buy, are there to bridge a gap for those who can’t quite afford to buy.
And yet Mayo did not get its first affordable purchase scheme until 2022, when the Department of Housing approved 13 units at Springcourt, Westport.
After more than three years of public debate, five out of the 50 houses on Westport’s Golf Course Road estate were recently designated for affordable purchase. They’re expected to go for between €232,000 and €259,000 in a town where you’ll get nothing for less than €300,000.
Minister Dillon says getting an affordable scheme in Mayo’s most expensive postcode ‘has taken a lot longer than we would have envisaged’ but is hopeful that similar schemes will be approved for Castlebar Ballina.
“Westport was a scheme of priority, Castlebar will be a scheme of priority, so will Ballina,” he says.

Pyrite scandal
MAYO has been particularly, but not uniquely, affected by the pyrite scandal which has condemned hundreds of homes mainly in the north-west quarter of the county.
While pyrite has ruined hundreds of lives and ended relationships from Páirc na Coille to Carrowteige, the so-called ‘100 percent redress’ scheme has also left many Mayo homeowners short-changed to the tune of tens of thousands.
We ask Minister Dillon why the government - who have pledged a full review of the redress scheme within six months - has ignored calls from opposition parties and the European Parliament to award 100 percent redress to affected families instead of the existing ‘sliding scale’ compensation model.
“There is so much variation between different types of homes that are impacted, they have used the society of chartered surveyors to assess how applications will be grant aided,” said Minister Dillon.
“It isn’t a grant that provides 100 percent redress. It is a grant of last resort, nor is it compensation. It is to support those impacted on the basis of what the current home is and what the rebuild costs will be.”
Even after a series of record-breaking, multi-billion euro housing budgets, the key housing metrics inside and outside Mayo continue to head in the wrong direction.
The Central Bank has estimated the country needs to deliver 52,000 houses a year to stand still and 70,000 a year to make any dent in the housing deficit - which the Housing Commission has estimated to be over 200,000 houses.
Last year saw 33,000 housing completions. Minister Dillon’s party aims to deliver 60,000 units a year by 2030. Only then, he says, will we see ‘a positive impact on downward pressures on housing prices and also rental prices’.
“Boosting supply is our number one challenge that we face,” he says, “and we have to use every lever at our disposal, both policy and financially and build capacity within the sector.”