Forty six years ago Meath County Council built 12 council houses in Lobinstown but no council house has been built in that area since, Fine Gael Cllr Paddy Meade has told a meeting of Meath County Council. “We have an awful lot of great plans but to actually delivery them… I often think about my own and other villages along the county border and a lot of the children who grew up there have migrated over the county border, to places like Ardee for housing, because they have no other option”.
Cllr Gallagher proposed that the motion that the council to build houses as has been delivered in th past.
Councillors were told that there was no demand for housing in these villages but he challenged that. The council would have to see how it could get not only private houses, but social houses into the kind of villages he represented. He and Cllr Mike Bray were supporting a motion by Sinn Fein Cllr Michael Gallagher calling for the provision of more houses in rural areas. Cllr Bray said that the idea of providing “nodes” in rural areas was a good one but the resources had to be put in place to bring this about. There was an array of villages in the North and South of the county where they had not seen much development in the last decade or so, he said. If even six houses were built in a rural village that would “probably sort the community for a decade or more”.
Cllr Joe Fox ‘department lacks flexibility on housing in rural areas.
Fine Gael Cllr Joe Fox said that he had done a lot of research into this issue. In the last development plan there was an objective to provide serviced sites on the edge of villages. Local landowners had offered land for the building of houses in some villages but “the department had put every obstacle in the way of it”. Extra houses could provide a lifeline for local communities. He gave the example of Killyon near the Hill of Down which had no children enrolled in the local school for next September. “You need a constant movement of people to keep services going and keep communities alive. The fault lies here not with the council which did all it could along with other councils but with the department which lack flexibility and inability to think outside the box”, Cllr Fox said. “It’s like banging your head off the wall up there”, he added.
