Mayo remains All-Ireland champion of dereliction

ALL-IRELAND WHINGER COLUMN

Mayo remains reigning All-Ireland champion when it comes to being Ireland's most derelict county. While other counties are improving their numbers, Mayo stands alone, becoming slightly more derelict as the years progress. Why?

The latest GeoDirectory Q2 report shows Mayo still sits atop the national leaderboard, hosting 14.2 per cent of Ireland's derelict properties.

That's up by the narrowest of margins - 0.1 per cent - on the year previous, but well up on 2022, when the county held 13.4 per cent of the State's derelict housing stock. At best, we are standing still. At worst, we are moving backwards while the rest of the country moves forward.

Search daft.ie for properties under €75,000, one bed minimum to exclude sites, and a familiar slew of cottages and bungalows appears - some with roofs caved in, others with the fresh tracks of a digger, which seems to add about €20,000 to the asking price. Mayo is awash with these sites. They are simply not moving at the pace seen elsewhere.

Political focus in Mayo remains fixed on the housing crisis, as it does nationally. Homeless hubs have been a recurring theme this year, with families facing eviction ahead of the new rental rules introduced in spring. Heartbreaking accounts have filled these pages of families searching for accommodation in their own locality - not a homeless hub in a faraway town. They know, as we all do, that dereliction blights every town and village in this county. You only need to walk down the road to see it.

GeoDirectory defines a derelict building as one that requires structural work or reconstruction before it can be reoccupied, usually leaving it dormant for several years. Mayo accounts for 14.2 per cent of the 19,137 derelict homes nationally - 2,717 derelict homes in Mayo alone.

Families are tearing their hair out searching for a home, prices are rising to record levels year on year, and this potential bounty sits idle. Mayo's dereliction problem far outweighs its size: with a population of 137,000 in 2022 - 2.6 per cent of the State's population - the county carries more than five times its population share of the country's derelict housing.

Some will point the finger at the local authority. In fairness, Mayo County Council has been working on it. The derelict sites register has grown since the spotlight was put on it and its responsibility has moved from the environment team to housing. Mayo's register is now almost double the size of any neighbouring county in Connaught, Ireland's most derelict province. Yet our share of derelict homes keeps growing, even as there is better news on vacancy.

The Croí Cónaithe grant - €50,000 for a vacant home renovation, €70,000 for a derelict one - remains the best affordable home scheme available, but it has not shifted the dial on Mayo's dereliction problem. That may change with the derelict site tax due next year.

Council sources say the prospect of the tax that will come under the remit of Revenue has already prompted more owners to move on derelict sites than the derelict sites register itself ever did. That can only be good news.

The grants appear to have worked on vacancy. Vacancy is the low-hanging fruit: €50,000 goes a long way toward making a house habitable, provided it ends up with a bathroom, kitchen and bedroom in place, as the grant requires. Mayo's vacancy rate has fallen from 11.4 per cent in 2022 to 10.3 per cent in 2026, that’s an estimated 7,200 homes idle in a housing crisis, considerably down on the 2021 vacant homes figure of 7,848 for Mayo.

That's a solid achievement, but four years and a month since the grant was introduced, we are nowhere near making real gains on our idle housing stock.

Councillors and local politicians naturally gravitate to new developments or rural planning loosening - easier to explain to the public, glossier, and good for a ribbon-cutting. But if the goal is keys in young people's hands, there is another route.

Like most good things, it takes work.