A senior local authority official has had his town postered with claims that he is worse than a Nazi for trying to take vacant and derelict properties into State ownership.
Coilín O’Reilly, chief executive of Carlow County Council, said using compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) to acquire properties for housing was not culturally acceptable to all.
“You are taking a piece of property from somebody,” he said. This, he suggested, could generate strong emotions “with our colonial history”.
He said: “We would have had posters put up about me all over Carlow town, saying we’re worse than a certain German party of the ’30s.”
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Mr O’Reilly, who also chairs the City and County Managers Association, told the Oireachtas Committee on Housing that local authorities had entered 11,220 vacant and derelict properties into CPO proceedings in 2023-24, but as a last resort.
“In most cases, you engage with private owners and they say, ‘I don’t want to lose this property, I’d better do something with it.’
“We did 32 CPOs [in Carlow], but 146 properties have been returned to use by the private owners.
“The CPO is at the end of a process. It often comes when there is a family row over ownership or a difficulty identifying the owner.
“But the key question is, how long do you engage? We have a case that we left for a year because the person said they were definitely fixing the property up for their daughter to live in. After a year-and-a-half, we had to say ‘you’ve had enough time’ and we CPO-ed it.”
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He said reform of the CPO legislation to set clear time limits would help everyone know what step would follow after what period of time. Without such clarity, local authorities were interpreting the rules differently and separately trying to gauge how long a period was acceptable before telling a property owner they had run out of time.
Mr O’Reilly was speaking as TDs and Senators expressed frustration over the pace of converting derelict and vacant properties into homes.
Anthony Flynn, assistant chief executive of Dublin City Council, said the Government’s recent incentives for new-build apartments were welcome, but added: “We believe that addressing vacancy and dereliction must be given equal priority.
“We are asking for enhanced supports from central government to address the viability issue of tackling dereliction and vacancy, particularly in the city centre.”
The meeting on Tuesday heard that the landmark Royal City of Dublin Hospital on Baggot Street in Dublin, which the HSE has put on the market, was unlikely to be considered by any State agency for conversion to housing.
“I do understand the HSE were in discussions with Dublin City Council about the potential use of it, but the cost would be prohibitive,” said Laura Behan of the Department of Housing.
She said the building, which is almost 200 years old, would be a “very, very challenging” project.
Committee members were told that local authorities were making progress in returning empty council houses, or “voids”, to use faster. However, they expressed concern that refurbishment works were being carried out without retrofitting.
Ms Behan agreed that, ideally, the homes would be retrofitted before being allocated to new tenants but said the priority was to make more housing available and retrofitting would slow the process.
Orla Murphy, assistant professor of architecture at University College Dublin, told the meeting that local authorities needed to do more to help private owners convert commercial and other non-residential buildings to housing.
She said they should “remove barriers by supporting owners through complex planning and building regulation processes, which should be simplified”.
