‘State won’t be building houses’

FINE Gael’s local election candidate Blaine Gaffney agrees “100 per cent” that Sligo County Council should release lands from the Strategic Land Reserve to give local developers somewhere to build.

“Something has to be done. I know what developers were blamed for during the recession but we need to be listening to developers now,” he told this newspaper.

“The State isn’t going to be building houses - these are the guys who will be taking the risks and bearing the costs.

“It’s the developers not the State who will be building houses in the future. We need to be looking at ways of supporting them,” he said.

Gaffney said Government needed to look at what’s preventing developers from building in Sligo: “What’s making these units so expensive to build? Is the VAT rate too high? I can’t see how we can get out of this without some form of intervention like releasing land from the Strategic Land Reserve,” he said.

Gaffney said the Vacant Site Levy which will come into force in 2019 should encourage some landowners to sell sites but in the meantime said he would be “100 per cent” supportive of the Council releasing land from the reserve.

“The majority of the sites around Sligo are landlocked. It’s got to the stage where it’s very, very scary and difficult. We need to look at addressing VAT in the budget or getting the Council to release land,” he said.

In Sligo, 122 planning permissions for houses were granted in 2017, up from 117 in 2016.

So far this year, 33 new houses were completed in Q1, compared to 20 in Q1 2017.