Cork Council may provide more accessible housing for people with disabilities

Developers could be required to include a portion of accessible houses in any new developments

Cork County Council is considering more accessible homes for people with disabilities.

Cork County Council is to look at providing more universally-accessible homes for people with disabilities and to cope with an increasingly elderly population in the years ahead.

This could include a proviso that private developers selling housing units to the council, known as 'turnkey' properties, ensure a certain percentage of them are specifically designed to accommodate such people.

The council's special purpose committee (SPC) on housing will discuss drawing up new guidelines to address the issues, after a report was sought on the number of disabled people on the council's housing waiting list by Fine Gael councillor, Kevin Murphy.

He was informed by the council's director of housing, Maurice Manning, that there are 625 people with various disabilities on the waiting list. The majority have physical disabilities, while others have mental or sensory disabilities.

On average, the council rehouses 100 per year and it has 570 specially adapted units within its stock.

"I'm concerned we're not paying enough attention to them. They deteriorate big time if not housed in proper housing developments. We need to up the numbers (of these) big time. Disabled people feel they're not getting a fair crack of the whip," Mr Murphy said.

In his hometown of Kinsale, the council recently opened a 40-house development, but just two were designed for the disabled.

"I don't think that's enough, really. We have to make an effort to purchase houses in towns and adapt them for the disabled. We need to take the bull by the horns and invest in these. We need to make it a policy that developers make a certain percentage of houses available for the disabled," Mr Murphy said.

"It's a good idea to allocate a certain percentage of houses to people with disabilities, but I think, in this day and age, we should be looking at universal design principles, so all houses are built to be suitable to house disabled people and also particularly with our ageing population in mind as well," Fianna Fáil councillor Gearoid Murphy said.

Fianna Fáil councillor Patrick Gerard Murphy, who is a wheelchair user, said housing adaptations cost a huge amount and it would be more cost-effective if they were designed at build stage to be more accessible.

"We need to future-proof our housing going forward," Independent councillor Paul Hayes said.

Fianna Fáil councillor Seamus McGrath, who is chairman of the council's housing SPC, said his committee would discuss this and bring recommendations to the council.

Council chief executive Tim Lucey said while the council does its best to accommodate people with disabilities, it's "an important debate" and further discussion on addressing it is needed.

Fine Gael councillor Gerard Murphy said it is vital the council moves quickly to address the fact that people will live longer.

He said it's costing the taxpayer huge money to move people into nursing homes, because they can't live independently in homes that aren't adapted for their needs.

Fine Gael councillor Michael Paul Murtagh said many local authority homes in Germany were designed to accommodate such people.

It was agreed the housing SPC members will liaise with senior planning officials to come up with new policies to address the situation.