Cork City Council gets €14m debt write-off for social housing land banks 

Cork City Council's proposed residential development  of 34 units at a site in Nash’s Boreen on the northside of the city. 

The Government has approved a near €14m debt write-off for Cork City Council in respect of two land banks it bought several years ago for social housing.

Details of the write-off, designed to help fast-track the delivery of social housing projects on local authority-owned land banks, were given to city councillors at April’s council meeting in response to a question from Fianna Fáil councillor Seán Martin.

As opposition councillors called for the reinstatement of the eviction ban during a meeting dominated by housing issues, Mr Martin and his Fianna Fáil colleagues insisted that increasing housing supply was key.

The Cork City Council-owned land bank on the old Whitechurch Road. File picture

Sinn Féin councillor Mick Nugent said extending the eviction ban would have given the Government time to introduce emergency measures to create the necessary capacity and safety nets for vulnerable renters.

“No councillor should be standing over the Government decision [to lift the eviction ban]. We should be standing with vulnerable families and renters who are facing homelessness,” he said.

“We should be sending the message that Cork City, home of the Tánaiste, does not want to see families evicted into emergency accommodation.” 

Independent councillor Thomas Maloney said the numbers facing eviction were “absolutely clear” and were proof the Government had “failed abysmally”.

“What we are dealing with immediately is 167 notices to quit in Cork City. They are the real numbers,” he said.

Record funding

But Mr Martin said the Government was providing record funding to help local authorities deliver housing.

He asked officials if they had made a submission to the Government’s local authority land legacy debt initiative, and if it had secured any debt relief arising out of any submissions it had made.

In response, the city’s head of housing, Niall Ó Donnabháin, confirmed the council’s housing department had made an application for funding under the social housing investment programme to the Department of Housing in early December 2022 in respect of two specific sites the council owns.

The lands are on the Old Whitechurch Road, a site earmarked for hundreds of social homes, and at Nash’s Boreen, also earmarked for a substantial social housing project.

Mr Ó Donnabháin said the application was made in response to a communication from the department to local authorities last November which committed to working to identify appropriate measures to address the local authority land legacy debt and to support the advancement of social housing on indebted sites in the ownership of local authorities.

He said the city council received notification in late December 2022 of a grant of funding in relation to the two applications amounting to just over €13.8m — some €11,516,433 in relation to the Old Whitechurch Road lands, and some €2,348,478 in relation to the Nash’s Boreen lands.

Mr Martin welcomed the news and said the figures clearly state the Government’s commitment to funding the delivery of social housing.

Completed dwellings

Meanwhile, in response to another question from Mr Martin, he was told the number of completed new dwellings in Cork City, as verified by CSO data, is 3,700 units for the period 2019-2022. The figure takes into account the 2019 city boundary extension.

The figure includes both private and public delivery, they are new-builds only and exclude refurbishments by either the public or private sector.

But the majority of those new builds — some 2,286 new homes — have been delivered by Cork City Council: 2,049 for social housing, 132 for affordable housing and 105 homes for cost rental provision.

Councillors were told the city has a current pipeline of 1,986 social homes, with schemes comprising a total of 1,151 units across 32 developments under construction.

While opposition councillors praised the council’s housing department for the work it is doing, it insisted the pace of delivery was not fast enough, and they highlighted the various warnings which have been issued by homelessness campaigners like Fr Peter McVerry and Sr Stan about the impact of the lifting of the eviction ban.