The suggestion of building more council housing in villages of Tipp has been taken on board.
Councillor Michael Fitzgerald made the proposal at the most recent meeting of Tipperary-Cahir-Cashel MD, who says people don’t request villages because there aren’t any options available for them.
This comes following updates that more than 800 applicants have been approved, primarily in the towns of Cashel, Tipperary, and Cahir.
He says he wants to keep life in the villages alive, as they are the lifeblood of the community.
The Fine Gael councillor says that not everyone wants to live in towns.
“We have a landbank in each of our villages; we should utilise it. We should have a rolling system of when Bansha and Ardfinnan are finished, that three more villages will come on stream, and three more after that. That we will have prepared to make sure that we have, within our villages, houses being built and an opportunity for people to live within their own communities. Everybody doesn’t want to live in towns, and people are finding it really hard now to acquire sites to build their own houses.”
Cllr. Fitzgerald also says that his own village of Golden is being held back for more builds due to not having a waste water treatment plant,
The Fine Gael councillor said the villages in Tipp need to be prioritised as much as the towns are.
“Other facilities have that, and it’s standing to them that there’s not raw sewage flowing straight into the river. It’s holding us back for development investment, housing, and business purposes. Our villages are every bit as important as our towns and should be treated in an equal capacity because they are the lifeblood of the community. We have to get back to the system that we had, where the council built houses in our larger villages, kept the villages alive, kept the schools open, kept the shops open, and the GAA clubs and everything else. We have to look at that system in a real way again.”
The housing engineer assured that they were actively looking at the larger villages where landbanks are available for builds.
