Villages excluded from housing crisis plans, say councillors

Council officials have been accused of ignoring villages in north-west Cork, which “are dying on their feet” because they are not being included in ambitious plans to tackle the housing crisis.

Several local councillors said little was being done to build or buy houses in villages that were shedding populations and that this threatened their existence. Maurice Manning, the county council’s new director of housing, told a meeting of the council’s northern division, in Mallow, of local authority plans to have provided 1,217 houses to people on the housing waiting list by the end of 2017.

However, he said that most of the major house-building projects had been being earmarked for larger urban areas, such as Douglas, Carrigaline, Ballincollig, Midleton, Fermoy, and Clonakilty. While the council is set to purchase one-off houses in some rural villages, councillors say they are ignoring the huge need to get new blood into some communities, especially north-west Cork.