Kells council wants to buy vacant homes in town

Kells Town Council has called for additional funding from the Government to buy vacant houses in a bid to alleviate the housing problem in the town. At a meeting of the council last week, Cllr Tommy Grimes called on the Minister for Finance to provide special funding to purchase houses that were lying idle in the town in a bid to reduce the housing waiting list. The council had earlier heard that local authorities would not be receiving funding to build houses this year, but Meath's local authorities would receive a total of €8,135,000 to buy houses around the county. Cllr Grimes said the right thing to do at this time was to buy up unsold houses to help alleviate the housing crisis in the town. "There are 153 people on the housing list in this area and I regard that as a crisis and now, with the recession, the problem is going to get worse. This is the proper time to buy houses, now that we can get good value," he said. He was critical of people who were talking about knocking unsold houses when there were waiting lists for housing all over the country. "The local authorities and the Government should be in a position to buy those houses now." Cllr Brian Collins said the question had to be asked about what would happen to housing stock. He pointed out that there were a lot of estates around Kells with a high rental occupancy and a lot of those tenants were leaving. He said the council would have to look at "going in on the ground" and buying housing. Cllr Oliver Sweeney said it would make a lot of sense to buy up housing at this time. Cllr Conor Ferguson said that while the council still had land, he believed they should be building, because there was now mass unemployment and a lot of unemployed construction workers with great skills. He remarked that Ireland was now sending architects and other highly educated people, who had been educated with taxpayers' money, abroad and we should be trying to keep them at home. Cllr Sarah Reilly said that buying unsold houses was a better route to go than the other schemes proposed by the Government which included local authorities leasing property from landlords to provide social housing. "Renting is dead money. Buying these properties should be looked at. The Government is pumping money into questionable projects, so they could provide money for this," she declared.