Sir, – It’s not entirely clear how many vacant and derelict properties there are in Ireland (“Counting Dublin’s derelict properties could take a year, says Hazel Chu”, News, November 9th, 2021). But it’s a lot.
There are two ways to tackle this: “carrots” (grants) and “sticks” (taxes, compulsory purchase orders).
The Government has ostensibly tried “sticks”. But compulsory purchase orders are rare and councils have only collected a tiny fraction of unpaid levies on derelict sites (“Councils collected just €378,000 in derelict site levies in 2020”, News, November 12th, 2021).
The Government has been promising a new property tax “next year” but there is no sign of any legislation yet and we’ve been talking about this for five years now (“Minister expected to address calls for tax on vacant homes”, News, August 8 th, 2017). The Government has also tried carrots. But Simon Coveney’s refurbishment scheme was a flop (“Virtually ‘no interest’ in State-funded housing refurbishment scheme”, News, August 10th, 2017).
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Note that this scheme would have left these properties in landlords’ hands. A juicy carrot indeed!
Now it wants to try more carrots. It’s going to “help people buy” these properties. So it’s not going to help them renovate them in a climate-aware way.
Instead, it’s going to take money from taxpayers who can’t afford to buy homes, and give it to the same people who refused to alleviate the crisis – even when they were offered big fat cheques to do so. This will drive up prices for properties that are already overpriced because people are desperate.
Can we stop with the carrots, please? Can we have sticks? Enough is enough. – Yours, etc,
Dr NIAMH
O’RIORDAN,
Midleton,
Co Cork.