Mr. Paul Clifford:

I thank the committee for this opportunity to make a presentation on what Monaghan County Council is trying to do in Castleblayney. My colleagues from the regeneration committee in Castleblayney were here last week. I would like to put our efforts in context. There are five towns and over 20 small villages in County Monaghan, which has a population of 61,000. The population of the county is split 70-30 between rural and urban areas. It is a heavily rural-based county. We liaise with four town teams and one chamber of commerce. We have a programme for the development of 40 community plans in each of the settlement areas over the next five years.

Castleblayney, which has a population of 3,600, is a former rural market town but it is becoming a commuter town. Although there has been a slight fall in the population of the town in recent times, it has generally been stable. People commute from Castleblayney to work along the M1 corridor. The town has good schools, residential facilities and recreational facilities and offers a good lifestyle. As a Border town, it has suffered from being so close to the Border. There was a certain amount of vacancy after the recession. The commercial vacancy rate in the town centre is 22.5%. There are former shops, offices and workshops that are vacant along Main Street and one or two streets off that street.

Following the abolition of the town council in 2014, we established town teams in each of the towns. Castleblayney Regeneration Committee is the town team for Castleblayney. The community engagement is high but the business participation in it is relatively low. There is a lack of business confidence there for all the factors set out by Mr. Hynes earlier. We had a particular challenge in Castleblayney as there are five derelict public buildings owned by Monaghan County Council. They include former courthouses and the Hope Castle estate. This is our challenge. We are resolving it through the rural regeneration and development fund. We have already tackled two of the buildings and are working on the other three. Over time, we can resolve those with resources but we are talking about resources of the order of €15 million to €20 million.

The challenge that the pilot town centre living initiative is attempting to address is the other side of the coin, namely, private residential development in the town. Like the other towns described here, there is an abundance of vacant, derelict and poor quality housing - narrow terraced housing that is difficult to develop. Some of it is over former shops. We concentrated on a tight and compact area in Castleblayney. The report is due at Christmas. We approached it by approaching each individual property and looked at site aggregation, which is a problem in towns and developing towns and is an excuse for people and State agencies to move out of town. I was conscious of last week's presentation where the "town first" policy was being advocated. That is something with which we would concur but it is quite difficult to bring the other State agencies in on that. We have identified owners and the status of each property within the area. We carry out a land use survey and are looking at the barriers to redeveloping that area. The report is expected next month. We reckon that one of the key requirements is that we would have a dedicated person to work with the owners on the ground. That is not necessarily an architect but somebody who would be familiar with the whole regime of building control, design, urban renewal and the economics of the town. That was successful in the mid-2000s with the tax renewal scheme. We engaged a person to deliver the tax renewal scheme in certain towns and it was pretty successful. That is becoming one of the other key recommendations from the report that is due next month. The good news is that we have another four towns in the county to deal with.