New health centre strikes at the heart of illnesses

By Dara Bradley

The dreams of 3,500 people on the city housing list are set to be dashed next week as Galway City Council outlines plans to ‘give away’ 21 acres of Council-owned land earmarked for social housing.

The move could mean no social housing will be built in Galway for up to ten years. The decision to offload the land has been taken by the Acting City Manager as the City Council cannot afford to pay the cost of servicing loans taken out to buy the land.

The proposal, dubbed the ‘NAMA for local authorities’, will shatter the hopes of the 3,500 people on Galway City Council’s housing waiting list who had hoped the land would be used to build up to 400 new units of social housing – the Council has admitted any new social houses might not be built for ten years.

During the boom years, the Council raised more than €26 million in loans to purchase land in Knocknacarra and Rahoon to build social houses.

The three sites owned by the Council, at Ballyburke and on the Ballymoneen Road, are now lying idle and the loans are accumulating interest – the value of the outstanding loan now stands at €29.5 million. The Council has admitted that these lands would not be developed for at least five years and possibly ten years.

Acting City Manager Joe O’Neill is proposing that 60% of the land – that is 21 acres of the Council’s 38 acres which were bought at the height of the boom – be included in the Government’s new Land Aggregation Scheme.

This means the Council would give the land to a state agency (which is not yet established) – it would no longer own the land but the debt and the cost of servicing the loans would also be transferred to the new body, which is like a ‘NAMA for local authorities’.

The proposal is likely to be strongly resisted by City Councillors given the backlog of people on the housing waiting list – there are more than 3,500 waiting to be housed and a further 400 applicants waiting to be assessed to get on this list. Some people are on the waiting list for 10 years.

City Councillor Derek Nolan (Lab) said the proposal is daft while City Councillor Catherine Connolly (Ind) described it as bizarre.

“If approved, this would mark the death knell for social housing in Galway as we know it. If this is approved we will lose 60% of our landbank and there will be no guarantee and no assurance that we can get this back in the future,” said Cllr Nolan.

Cllr Connolly said: “It is bizarre and makes no sense on any level. [The] City Manager’s decision to suspend all public housing construction beggars belief.”

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune