It is not a particularly good look for the national body representing the construction industry when one of its properties is allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair that it collapses onto a busy street during the Monday morning rush hour. The optics only get worse when it emerges that the site that included the heavily overgrown Victorian cottage has been on Dublin City Council’s derelict site register since June 2023 and that the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) has accrued unpaid levies of €140,000.
It is not, however, an entirely surprising turn of events. Since 2020 local authorities have been able to impose a levy of 7 per cent of the value of a derelict site on its owners. The measure – intended to combat hoarding and speed up development in the midst of a housing shortage – would appear to be honoured as much in the breach as the observance.
The à la carte approach adopted by local authorities was detailed in the Dáil this week by Sinn Féin TD Thomas Gould. He told colleagues that only one in three of the 1,913 properties on the derelict sites register had been levied and that 13 local authorities had not imposed any levies, while 17 authorities had collected no levies.
The ambivalence of so many local authorities is only matched by the sense of impunity demonstrated by many site owners. Up to €20.5 million in levies have been applied, but not paid.
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The collapse this week of the cottage in Dublin is a wake-up call, not least that derelict site levies are a public safety measure as well as a development incentive. It is a matter of good fortune that a member of the public was not hurt, or worse, which could have meant Dublin City Council facing potential litigation.
If this is not a sufficiently self-serving incentive for local authorities to take their responsibilities more seriously the Minister for Housing and Local Government must intervene to ensure enforcement. Dereliction is a blight on our cities and towns but, despite years of talking about it, successive governments and local authorities appear to have seen it as being someone else’s problem.
