Labour delivers new funding to deal with boarded up houses

I warmly welcome new funding of €3.9million to bring a 236 long-term vacant Dublin City Council homes back up to scratch and made available to families on the housing list.

Today’s announcement of a second round of funding means €7.1m will be given to Dublin City Council this year, to bring a total of 371 boarded up houses back into stock.

I speak to people on the housing list at my advice clinics every week who are fed up seeing boarded up houses in our community, at a time when there is a real housing shortage. Some of those houses stay that way for months, which has a knock on effect for the whole area.

Empty council homes also attract anti-social behaviour and illegal dumping, especially when they’re left empty for months on end.

This extra funding to the Council to renovate these void houses will be a great relief to neighbours who live beside these homes, as well as families who are on the housing list.

Nationally, Labour Housing Minister Jan O’Sullivan is allocating €15m today for renovation works on 1008 local authority homes.

We need to invest more in social housing to tackle the huge problems there at the moment. My Labour colleagues and I will continue to push for more investment in social housing, and bringing ‘ready to go’ boarded up houses back into stock is a common sense approach as part of this aim.