Thomas Gould (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I was extremely disappointed last week to learn that Blackpool, in the heart of my community, will not be included in the town centre first policy and therefore will miss out on any funding that will be available. Blackpool is a beautiful and historic village in the heart of Cork city that has so much unlocked potential. I have previously invited the Minister to come to Cork and look at the levels of dereliction in this area, but he has refused to do so, saying he has already seen it. No one who has walked through Blackpool would have excluded the village from this project. While it is beside the city centre, Blackpool has the potential to be a vibrant and bustling village in its own right. It is only this Government’s exclusion of it that is preventing this.

The town centre first policy does little to address the failure of local authorities to identify and collect the derelict sites levy. There are still no initiatives from the Government to improve the collection of the levy and I cannot understand why. Collecting the derelict sites levy would create funding streams for local authorities to add and compulsorily purchase more sites and ultimately to reduce dereliction. The Minister of State needs to intervene here because we are seeing wasted potential across our cities and communities and the Government is shrugging its shoulders and blaming local authorities once again, something it always does when it is not doing its job.

The last available data on vacancy are from 2016 and, according to those and a collation of these data by Eoghan Ua Laoghaire Mac Giolla Phádraig, there were parts of Cork city with vacancy rates of 14%. The first action in the National Vacant Housing Reuse Strategy 2018-2021 was to "Establish robust, accurate, consistent and up-to-date data sets on vacancy”, and yet I am talking to the Minister of State today and we still cannot find accurate data. The Government has failed to tackle vacancy and dereliction because Fine Gael and others in government are more interested in supporting developers and land hoarders. In the past week, six families and individuals have come to me with eviction notices. Last Friday, a person went into emergency accommodation in Cork. This person is a college graduate with a degree who is going for a masters in September with a full-time job but has been made homeless because of the Government’s policies. How can the Government stand over that?

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