Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister of State may know, I also put in, before the summer, a whole series of detailed questions on this area of the OPW’s property portfolio. Since we returned to the House, frankly, I think we need to take a serious look at the management of that portfolio.

Another thing to add to this debate is that in one of the answers the Minister of State gave me before the summer recess, we discovered that the OPW has 108 unoccupied properties, most of which have been vacant since 2013, and a small number are empty for almost half a century. Some 70 of these are buildings and 38 are unused sites. Some 47 of these are Garda stations that were closed in 2012 and 2013 and still lie empty, including two in my own area: Kill of the Grange, Deans Grange and Dalkey Garda stations, and many other such stations litter the place. As to the question as to whether we should lease, buy or build, I ask what we are doing with all of this empty property and why are we not putting it to public use?

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