Mr. Eamon O'Flaherty:

I thank the committee. IPAV has long had a major concern about the decaying condition of the majority of our rural towns and villages across the country. Many of these towns and villages contain boarded up former residential and commercial premises with no viable future as a commercial entity. The right kind of radical intervention could breathe new life into these decimated towns and villages. We estimate there are approximately 1,500 of these towns and villages right across our country. We would like to see the introduction of a tax incentive scheme to convert non-viable commercial and residential buildings into solely residential use for owner-occupiers. Already, our members have identified 300 or 400 of these properties throughout the country that would be suitable for such a scheme, with no expensive outlay for the Government; it would be a win-win scenario economically, socially and politically for all of us.

IPAV welcomes the Living City initiative but it is too limited, focusing only on the regeneration of the historic centres of six cities, including Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford and Kilkenny. There is a clear need for a nationwide scheme that would be open to all our rural towns. Otherwise, such towns will continue to languish and disappear before our eyes. Such an initiative would be win-win for every member of the community. Parts of south Wales, for example, have been struggling with the issue of regeneration more than a century after the first coal pits closed. They desperately want to reverse this legacy of industrialisation but much-promised regeneration has had little success, with the region topping league tables of poverty, ill-health, educational disadvantage and inequality.

The issue must be part of a co-ordinated whole-of-government approach, bringing together all existing incentives. We must examine how they could be co-ordinated and identify how these could be filled with relatively small financial outlays and the setting of specific achievable objectives, especially including yearly targets for local authorities and any implementation plan, with timeframes for each objective.