Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will rant away for a while so. I welcome the town centre first plan and the intentions are good. A lot of it sounds great such as the goal of commissioning research to inform the assessment of cost benefit and social return on investment in town centres to better inform public policy interventions. That sounds great if you could understand what it means. I will give two practical examples of why the town centre first initiative is not working and I will give the example of Tralee town centre. It is the only part of the county that between 2005 and 2011 had a population decline at the height of the Celtic tiger.

One problem is that there is a 100% waiver of commercial rates for vacant commercial premises where the owner of the property says he or she is trying to sell the property. This should be the exception rather than the rule. If a premises is left empty for more than 12 months it should either be sold or leased or the owner should be punished by the imposition of full commercial rates. In the UK, where these problems have been seen in the past 20 to 30 years, they have come to the conclusion that it is not good enough just to have people living in the town centre; people must also be working there. Allowing a situation where people can continue to sit on properties has to be unacceptable and the Government needs to intervene to make it impossible for that type of situation to continue.

The other example I will give is of the courthouse on Ashe Street in Tralee town centre. The courthouse has been there since the days of Daniel O’Connell and it was quarried from local limestone in the town park. It is literally part of the town and has been for many years. It saw many trials and is part of the history and social fabric of the town. There is a proposal, with the collaboration of Kerry County Council management, to move the Courts Service to another vacant premises in the town centre, a brown centre site as the Minster of State said. That is a retrograde step and goes against nearly every single one of the recommendations in the town centre first plan. This includes climate change because a new building will have to be built close to the town centre. There is no additional benefit to the town from the land which was given away to the town council at the time by Kerry Group. To advance this type of development in the town centre and to bring jobs into Tralee town centre it should be kept on Ashe Street, where it has been for 170 years. Many people will say it does not fit the needs of a modern court building or that the Courts Service has nothing to do with the Government, which is the last answer I got. I was told I would have to talk to the Courts Service about it, but the Minister of State is in government, so if he is serious about the town centre of the only large town in the whole of Cork, Limerick and Kerry, namely, Tralee, he will have to intervene to make sure there is an additional benefit to the town centre by keeping court services there.

Architects were mentioned and architects have decided that a grade 2 or 3 heritage architectural review must take place before any courthouse is abandoned, but that has been ignored in this situation. There is a plan but it is a bad plan, and to have all the other things that are mentioned in the town centre first plan, such as helping with the social and cultural future of the town, getting people into the town centre, and having people living there, it is important the Denny site, which is free, would be used for that. We should enhance and refurbish the courthouse in Tralee and the Government needs to intervene in that.

I want to mention something I have noticed over the past ten or 15 years. If a council is dealing with a local authority estate, it has an obligation to have proper estate management in place. Far too often I have seen that there is no estate management or proper balance when councils deal with town centres.

If there are to be grants for refurbishing houses and getting people to live in the centre of towns, an emphasis should be put on people who will live there as owner-occupiers rather than just having an investment in a property to rent it out to anybody.

I was looking up the census of Rock Street in Tralee town centre. Approximately 400 people were living on that street in their own places according to the census of 1911. Now, there are approximately 25. If we want people living in the town centre, that has to be pushed. We also have to get people working in there, and that means maintaining, keeping, enhancing and developing the structures already there, and if there is an extra space, such as there is in Tralee town, moving to that to encourage new centres where people can, as it says in the plan, enhance the cultural element of the town.

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