Batten the hatches, folks, the bulldozers are on the way . Both Brendan McDonagh, Chief Executive of NAMA and Planning Minister Ciaran Cuffe have signalled that some ghost estates will have to be knocked down. The NAMA chief said that the agency may consider paying for the completion of some estates but he added he went so far as to say that some developments “should never have been contemplated as it is hard for anyone with an objective view to see how they made sense even at the top of an over-heated market.” Ciaran Cuffe’s announcement of an audit of ghost estates in the country is certainly welcome but surely this information is already available to local authorities? A national audit sounds like it would take an awful long time.
In fact, Longford Co Council has already carried out an audit of housing estates and according to their figures, there are around 100 unfinished housing estates in Co Longford. Some of these estates contain houses at foundation level and others contain houses that are fully complete but ancillary works such as driveways, manholes, etc have yet to be completed. However there are 19 ghost estates – developments that are either finished or half-finished but have only one or two occupants.
We don’t need Brendan McDonagh to tell us that some of these developments will never be completed. It is obvious, that as he says, they should never have been built in the first place.
In Longford, Leitrim and Roscommon whole villages and communities have been destroyed by developments.
Take Kenagh village in Longford for example. Ten years ago, it was a picturesque little village of around 30 houses with lots of one-off houses in the surrounding areas. Between 2002 and 2006, planning permission for 261 houses was granted in the village and surrounding area. Yet between 2002 and 2006, the population of Kenagh increased from 225 to 241 – that’s just 16 people. Incidentally, between 1996 and 2002, the population of the village rose by just two people. This was never going to be a population hub.
Over 100 houses were built in Kenagh in private residential developments and today most of these estates are finished or part-finished. One estate lies closed off with the buildings standing at various levels of completion but the rest of the housing developments fared better. In some cases, the developments are finished but some houses lie eerily empty, while other houses are bursting with family life – bikes in the driveways, plants in the windows, clothes on the line. In other cases, lived-in homes stand side-by-side with half-built houses cordoned off with fencing and security tape. Young children playing beside the houses this week were using the fencing as a place to hang their jackets.
Bulldozers will not solve Kenagh’s problem. They can’t knock the entire village, and they can’t go in and knock only the empty houses like taking out teeth. They can, however, knock the unfinished houses and insist that the developers pay for the completion of the estates.
In other cases, the bulldozers don’t have to discriminate. They can just go ahead and knock entire estates. Let me suggest that they start with those estates built in random fields away from towns and villages around the county. These are not just ghost estates, they are half-baked estates – they didn’t address any long-term needs, they only addressed short term greed.
Then please let them move on to the developments which are so badly built that if you slam a door in Number 4, the walls shake in Number 6. Although, maybe we shouldn’t waste diesel on these estates, by the sound of things they will have knocked themselves down in no time at all.
But there are questions. Where will the bulldozers go? Who will decide this?
Who will pay for them? The developers who built them? The County Councils who granted planning permission? The banks who threw out the money for them? Us?
Ciaran Cuffe says the local communities will be involved in the decision-making process. Maybe he’s been swept away with the Conservative Party’s new manifesto but it’s hard to see how exactly that’s going to work.
What about the one or two occupants in the otherwise empty housing estates? What will happen to them? Even if they are thrilled to get out of these estates, they still will have to receive compensation for their houses.
Of course, there is a question about the practicality of knocking housing estates, however ill-advised they may have been. It’s not just a case of sending in the diggers and ripping up houses, foundations, water pipes and tarmac drives. What do you do with the debris? It would take a lot of money and a considerable amount of time to make this land suitable for agricultural use once again.
If these questions are addressed properly, then Brendan and Ciaran will be more than welcome to come in on their bulldozers and knock some of the housing estates. It won’t solve all our problems but it’s a start.
A children’s football game was taking place in Kenagh the other day, at the pitch on the
