Ms Mary Mulholland:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to appear before it. We have put a great deal of time and effort into this pilot and learned much, so it is great to be able to show it off on this end.

Kilkenny's town in the pilot scheme is Callan, which is one of five district towns in the county and located just 16 km south west of the city. The areas of scale in Kilkenny are Kilkenny city and smaller towns, all of the same population of approximately 2,000 to 2,500 people. The population in Callan is increasing. Similar to Ms McConnell's example from Mayo, it has been a market town for many years. Its centre was designed with narrow streets for horse-drawn carriages, though, and is not fit for today's needs. It has immense character and cultural significance, not just for Kilkenny but also for the south east. Working with the community in Callan under the framework for town centre renewal, Kilkenny County Council held a stakeholder engagement session and carried out a health check on the town. From that, we established a town team and a town plan, and the area of Bridge Street that the committee can see was identified as needing care, attention and change in particular. The pilot project came from that process. We wanted to get into the detail of the Bridge Street area and see what it would take to make it more attractive for investment, residential development and other forms of development.

The objectives that we set the pilot project were to identify the opportunities on Bridge Street, identify the owners and assess the individual properties to see where we could get engagement to bring forward worked examples of reuse, including adaptive reuse.

We wanted to improve the image of the street and people's feelings about the street. To that end, a number of community arts projects have been located in Bridge Street, including a performance by the Abbey Theatre on the street during this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival. People are re-engaging with the space. We wanted to identify barriers to reuse and to develop proposals for specific properties to a high standard with detailed, worked-through design proposals for mixed typologies of buildings, including an energy-efficiency solution. Energy was a big part of our pilot project. We wanted bring high-quality energy solutions to old conservation buildings. Our last objective was to identify financial supports that could bring those worked examples forward. The engagement and assessment was very intensive. Many of the buildings were found to be in particularly poor condition and to be deteriorating quickly. Some of them had not been structurally assessed, or assessed from an engineering point of view, for quite some time.

The slide that is being shown to the committee shows the Bridge Street area in the context of Callan as a whole. The bridge over the river is the centre of the town. Bridge Street is the area just below the bridge on the slide. Kilkenny County Council has secured funding under the town and village renewal scheme for some works to be done to improve the river. Under the rural regeneration and development fund, funding has been secured for the development of the Callan Motte field, which can be seen to the top of the slide currently on screen, as an amenity area. Both of those initiatives are seen as support measures for the attractiveness of Bridge Street. As members can see, Bridge Street is very compact. It will always be a challenge to provide open space for families and others who live there. We have addressed that with supporting measures under the funding structures I have mentioned.

A great deal of information on the individual properties and on the overall context of the street within the town has been considered as part of the pilot. We have assessed issues like traffic, access, sporting infrastructure, amenities and the public realm. It is a twofold pilot. It involves a detailed assessment of the actual street and the buildings within it, as well as completion and design proposals for three properties. It also involves an assessment of the broader context of how the street interacts within the town. An understanding of the barriers that exist has come out of all of those assessments. Why are these buildings not being reused? I will give a brief summary of the barriers we have identified. The first barrier is the age and general condition of the buildings. Some of these buildings are not suitable for adaptation. Some of them need to have pieces of them removed. The second barrier is the challenging space standards and general regulatory requirements. It is very difficult to meet modern building standards, fire regulations and private rented standards, while providing for high energy efficiency and good conservation practice, without compromising the integrity of the buildings or of the street. This challenge cannot be underestimated.

Another constraint is the size and shape of plots, many of which are in private ownership. There are parking and traffic issues at this location because of the narrowness of the street. This is not exclusive to Callan. There are many county towns and villages with very narrow streets that are a barrier to redevelopment. Another real issue is that many older residents are in situ, or own these properties and are in nursing homes or are living elsewhere. It can be difficult to get them to engage with this process and to buy in to our plans to change things dramatically. Many families who own properties in this area live elsewhere and find it difficult to engage with the prospect of redeveloping difficult buildings through a complex process at a high cost without any certainty of return on their investment. The high cost of these interventions is a major issue. As Ms McConnell said when she spoke about her town in County Mayo, the unit cost for the redevelopment or adaptive reuse of the properties we have looked at in particular detail is extremely high. The cost is more than the social housing cost ceilings from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. The interventions needed on the public side to turn these properties into public housing units would not be viable in this pilot. The cost established to achieve the desirable energy, conservation and design standards exceed the return that can potentially be achieved from rent or sale in the private market. We have found that the worked-through costs, which are there to be examined, cannot deliver a social or private outcome without an addition to the investment that is available.

We have learned an awful lot from our engagement with stakeholders and communities as part of this intensive pilot project. I will summarise those lessons. We have learned that engaging in singular interventions and piecemeal project development while meeting specific funding deadlines under a plethora of funding opportunities, all of which are welcome, will not deliver the strategic outcomes we want. A strategic long-term plan is required for town centre redevelopment. Plans must come from communities. Community and stakeholder engagement is paramount. The communities in towns are best placed to identify needs, barriers and opportunities and to put them in the order in which people want to see them delivered. We have seen in Callan that the town team approach works, but implementation must support such an approach. Public and private solutions are required. Local authorities cannot, and in my view should not, engage in the compulsory purchase of vast areas of streets in towns and villages for public housing solutions or other types of projects, such as museum projects, that are unsustainable. A mix of tenure is required in the interests of social sustainability. Conditions must attract private investment. There is a need for private and public solutions. In the absence of interventions, these types of areas will not meet population and social needs into the future. There is a social cost which is more difficult to quantify. These areas will become much bigger problems for local authorities and for the State if they become more dangerous or fall into a worse state of disrepair. Likewise, we cannot keep building new roads, sewers and footpaths to extend our villages and towns out into the countryside. Policy and funding alignment is essential if outcomes are to be supported by the market or, where they are not supported by the market, if an intervention that will make them deliver is to be designed.

Our towns and villages, in Kilkenny and in every other county in the country, have a significant value. They are our heritage. They are great places to live, work and do business. Callan, in particular, has a sizeable arts community. It is thriving. Many arts groups use vacant buildings from time to time, but they do not have the means to carry out capital works. Arts programmes support programmes rather than capital investment. Collectively, we have an opportunity to secure the vibrancy of towns like Callan. We are hearing about other such towns today. Current policy and market conditions cannot deliver what is needed and what each of these pilots is identifying as required. Inaction will have a greater financial and social cost into the future. We can use the information gathered from these pilots to inform policy in a coherent way while delivering real solutions. As Mr. Hynes has said, local authorities are best placed to lead that. We need a point of contact - an architect or a team - on the ground at municipal district level and at county level to tie all the different variables together in a way that communities can understand.