Government urged to rethink policy of rural housing

Government urged to rethink policy of rural housing


Anton McNulty
antonmcnulty@mayonews.ie

Fine Gael politicians ‘with a conscience’ were called to lobby the government to make funding available to build rural houses and allow people to live in their own areas.
The plea was made by Independent councillor Gerry Ginty at last week’s Strategic Policy Committee (SPC) meeting on Housing which was informed that there was no funding and no demand for rural housing. Senior Executive Office with Mayo County Council, Padraig Flanagan (pictured) told the meeting the the demand for one-off rural housing has fallen steadily in the last decade when up to 50 per cent of all council housing built was rural.
Mr Flanagan explained that the council received less than 10 requests for rural council housing per year when the figure was nearer 30 ten years ago. In the last year, the council have built two rural houses, he said, but these were special need homes and they had to ‘fight tooth and nail to get funding for them’.
Cllr Ginty said one of the reasons the demand for rural houses was low was because people knew they would not be successful. He said that rural areas were losing services such as post offices and schools and urged the government to make funding available for a scheme to revive rural areas.
“There must be someone in the government with a conscience and see the need to spend money on this type of thing. We look after our bogs and wildlife, which I approve of, but people come first and there is no use having a clean environment if there are no people. I would urge the people in the Fine Gael party to show they have a social conscience, I have given up on Labour a long time ago,” he said.
Cllr Ginty also criticised the former Minister for Housing, Michael Finneran and the Department officials for introducing this policy.
Fine Gael councillor Eddie Staunton said he also wants to see funding for rural housing but added that he had no knowledge of any planning application to build a rural house in the last year and he could not understand it. Mr Flanagan agreed that some people did not apply for rural housing because they knew they would be unsuccessful but this did not account for the full decline in demand. He said that the Council’s policy to build council houses in villages had satisfied a lot of the demand but added that the money was not there to build more.

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