Anne Cronin: Is Limerick’s directly-elected mayor a lost cause?
Limerick City and County Council is involved in a house purchase programme where they are buying homes for twice their value. Picture: Dan Linehan
In Limerick last week a derelict semi-detached house located beside a petrol station on the busy Ennis Road fetched a sale price of €740,000. While the road in question is considered one of the most affluent parts of the city to make a purchase, this house has been boarded up for years and resembles an image taken in the ghost estates of the last decade.
A concerning trend has developed in the city, where houses are selling for far in excess of what they were bought for in the previous couple of months. Alarmingly, many of these homes in Limerick and across the country are being bought by the local authority.
Limerick City and County Council is involved in a house purchase programme where they are buying homes for twice their value, mere months beforehand. Yes, we need more social housing, but this seems like the worst possible means of achieving that end.
Limerick and Waterford are witnessing the fastest-growing house prices in Irish cities and housing prices are now almost 8% higher than they were this time last year in Limerick City. Yet as much as the price tag determines our house purchasing ability, so too does availability. Currently, there are 34 three-bed houses in Limerick city for sale, just priced over the median for Limerick, at €225K.
As you trawl through the listings, some have gardens, some do not. Most are terraced and semi-detached and pepper-potted across suburban estates at various corners of the city. However, for those reliant on renting a family home, there is one home to rent in Limerick city, with three bedrooms — a standard set for family living.
In this ‘post-homeownership society’ that Michael Byrne, Professor of Social Policy in UCD, describes as being rooted in generational and class-based inequality, the future looks increasingly precarious for young working-class families who face the onslaught of increasing rents, childcare costs, energy and food costs.
Access to healthcare is precarious if these families are reliant on the public health system, and while Covid is still an ever-present in our society it continues to impact our ability to work, and maintain childcare, all the while impacting female-headed households to a far greater extent.
In the backdrop looms humanity’s planetary crisis, overshadowing our very existence, hitting those on low incomes or trapped in poverty. For many burdened with increasing costs of living, measures to avert the climate crisis become far-fetched and a privileged position to inhabit, so much so that those calling for climate mitigation measures are vilified for being out of touch.
The frailty of the notion of a common good or the true social order of equality, as set out in our constitution, has never been so obvious.
But Limerick is different. Or at least has the potential to be different. Limerick voted for a directly-elected mayor over 1,000 days ago and in doing so voted for local government to change how it does its business and whose interests it represents. The people of Limerick voted for transparency and accountability and the ability to vote out politicians that do not put the needs of the city, county and its people first.
Housing, transport, security, environment, Covid recovery, sustainable towns — all of these key priority areas for local government were promised a new type of leadership. One where the person at the top was directly answerable to the people of Limerick. No more unaccountable, faceless civil servants making decisions that our local councillors find impossible to challenge.
A directly-elected mayor with responsibility for delivering on housing could take Abbeyfeale in hand, with the third-highest rate of dereliction in the country and, as a custodian of our county towns, fight to protect and support the needs of those who live in these towns, to remain viable places to live and raise a family.
This same custodian could finally tackle the problem of social and economic disadvantage and exclusion experienced by those who live in St Mary's Park — labelled the most disadvantaged community in the country. In this vacuum of local government reform, Limerick City continues to hollow out.
Even its once shining star, the University of Limerick, is moving in the direction of Clare. Dereliction grows more precarious as the months progress, and the prospect of city centre housing remains a utopian dream.
The beating heart of Limerick is commercial office development, with an abundance of commercial space developed in recent years and with more planned. It’s as though Limerick is a place where people drive to work and leave again at 5pm having extracted enough to keep FDI interested.
The Opera Centre is a clear example of Limerick’s commercial ambitions, yet this development, which received regeneration funding to ensure accommodation was contained in the plan, will provide a paltry sum of 16 units of accommodation. The LDA’s Colbert Quarter, an ambitious city housing development, appears to have shut its doors, as though we dreamt it all.
When other cities voted against a directly-elected mayor in 2019 the people of Limerick dared to be different. They voted for change; a better system of local decision-making based on the principle of subsidiarity. However, it now feels like it never happened and has been abandoned altogether. Where is our vote?
- Anne Cronin of the Labour Party in Limerick
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