Cloverhill House outside Ballinamore in Co Leitrim has been in the O’Connell family for almost 100 years.
John O’Connell’s grandfather James purchased the property on July 4th, 1925 at auction. It was one of the finest houses in the area, with six bedrooms, an inside toilet and hot and cold water, relative rarities at the time.
The house passed to John’s mother Dolores, who died in 2012 leaving the house empty. Ownership passed to him and he was left with a dilemma – the house was too good to leave empty, but too expensive to do up to a standard that a family – in this case his own – could live in.
The introduction of the vacant property refurbishment grant in July 2022 was the catalyst for him and his wife Amanda to do what they aspired to do. The grant allows for payments of up to €50,000 for the refurbishment of homes that have been vacant for at least two years and an extra €20,000 for structural work on homes that are derelict.
They used the €50,000 to properly insulate the house, install underfloor heating and carry out rewiring and replumbing. “It’s been dragged into the 21st century,” he says. From being a house that was so cold that his mother chilled jelly in the hallway, it now has an A3 rating.
Working with Leitrim County Council was “an absolute dream”, he says. They filled out the appropriate paperwork, submitted it and within a few days they came back to carry out the initial inspection.
“Within two or three days, we had approval to start our work on the house. A month later we started the work.”
“I don’t know if we would have taken on this project, if we didn’t have this grant,” says Amanda. “The cost of materials had trebled if not quadrupled and the cost of labour had gone up. The most important thing for us was getting the fabric of the house right, the decorative stuff could come later.”
The O’Connells and their three children are moving into the house and vacating the home they built for themselves after they got married in the early 2000s.
Their family home will be put on the market to rent. The housing crisis has had a catastrophic impact on the availability of rental properties in many counties. There is not a single property to rent in Ballinamore, Leitrim’s second biggest town on either myhome.ie or daft.ie. There are two properties to rent in the whole of Co Leitrim on myhome.ie and four on Daft.
Leitrim is one of nine of the 26 counties in 2024 where the number of grants applied for through the vacant properties scheme was higher than the number of homes built (65 per cent), according to figures complied by Hardware Association Ireland, which represents builders merchants and the DIY industry.
The others are Roscommon (also 65 per cent), Donegal (62 per cent), Sligo (64 per cent), Cavan (61 per cent), Mayo (54 per cent), Kerry (53 per cent), Tipperary (53 per cent) and Monaghan (51 per cent).
This is a tribute to the popularity of the grant, but also a reflection of how little private development is going on in rural Ireland. In Leitrim just one private housing estate has been built since the crash; in Longford none has been built.
In Leitrim there were just 120 homes built in 2024, when there were 223 applications for the vacant grant. More than 70 per cent of the applications to Leitrim County Council for the grant have been approved. This is similar to the national rate of approval. Of the 12,404 applications made by the end of March, 8,652 were approved at a cost of €112.5 million.
Hardware Association Ireland recently met Minister for Housing James Browne. They suggested to him that he extend the scheme beyond single dwellings to allow the grant be used to convert vacant retail properties into housing. This would apply, for instance, if an owner had a multistorey property above a shop so that they could apply for separate grants for multiple apartments.
HAI estimates there are 20,000 homes that could be brought back into use from multiple over-the-shop conversions into apartments.
“We are fairly sure of the numbers. This a winning formula and there are not many success stories in housing. We believe that it can be easily done in a realistic manner,” says HAI chief executive Martin Markey.
He would appear to be pushing at an open door with the Minister, who said last week that the vacant property grant was a “massive part” of the Government’s response to the housing crisis.
He cited the conversion of a derelict row in Carlow town into 12 social housing units as an example of what could be done.
“It was amazing to see a derelict street brought back into a row of houses that people want to live in. I want to see more of this,” said Browne.
“Over-the-shop is a crucial part of that. We will be making an announcement on that in the very near future.”
Evidence of the popularity of the grant came when 300 people turned up to the Landmark Hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon on June 19th, along with 30 exhibitors, for a seminar organised by Leitrim County Council.
They heard presentations from Anne Marie O’Connor from the Department of Housing’s vacant homes unit, from Leitrim County Council’s vacant homes officer Shane Mulvey and from Mel Galvin, a research and development co-ordinator at the Atlantic Technological University in Sligo, who spoke about grants offered by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) .
The main speaker was celebrity architect Hugh Wallace, who is evangelical about the grant, having availed of it to do up his home in Clanbrassil Street in inner-city Dublin.
Mr Wallace said the scheme is easy to understand and those applying for it are working with local authorities who want to help rather than put obstacles in the way. “It is very unrestricted as grants go. It’s about a house being vacant for two years and/or with structural defeats and or up to €50,000 towards renovations of the interior. That’s as simple as the grant is," he said.
“The great thing about the grant is that the councils want to give it out. All the councils around the country want to be helpful because a derelict building does no use for them.
“From my experience, it is actually a very simple grant to get. The councils come out they do an initial inspection. It is very important that you have done minimal or no work before the inspection and you monitor what you are doing, keep all your bills and at the end of the process all your invoices, and the council will pay out those monies.”
Through the SEAI, householders can avail of grants of up to €25,000 on top of the €70,000 from the vacant homes grants.
The caveat is you cannot apply for two grants for the same item – insulated doors, for instance – through the vacant property grant and the SEAI.
Wallace praised local authorities for their willingness to issue the grants and to cut through the red tape that is holding up so many housing projects.
The scheme is working well but the €20,000 available to fix structural problems in derelict homes is not enough, he suggested, and there should be a more even split in grant money if somebody spends €70,000, as €20,000 is insufficient for remedying structural defects.
