Some of the most valuable housing in Ireland has already been built. It sits in council estates across every county, in three- and four-bedroom family homes now occupied by one person whose children grew up and moved on years ago. This week Cork County Council announced that it will try to unlock some of that stock, and the way it plans to do it says a good deal about what good planning for an ageing population should look like, and about how poorly our funding system supports it.
The council's proposal is modest in scale. It intends to build a block of 10 or 11 one-bedroom homes on a site in Cobh, with similar schemes earmarked for Youghal, Midleton and Macroom, over the next two years. These will be offered to council tenants living alone in larger houses that have become too big and too costly to heat. When they move, the family homes they leave behind go to households on the waiting list. The council's director of housing was clear that the sites have been chosen with care: in town centres, on flat ground and within easy walking distance of shops and services.
That last point is where planning practice comes in. Rightsizing only works if the new home is genuinely better for the person moving into it. Nobody should be asked to swap a house with a garden and familiar neighbours for a flat on the edge of town with no footpath to the chemist. Locating these schemes in the centres of established towns serves several policy aims at once. It brings people back to live in main streets that have lost residents for decades, it supports local shops and services, and it puts older people within reach of the things that let them stay independent for longer. It is the kind of compact, town-centre-first development that national and regional plans have been urging for years, delivered at a scale that small towns can absorb without controversy.
It also makes efficient use of public money. Every family housed in an existing council home is a family that does not need a new one built from scratch, with the land, servicing and time that involves. A block of a dozen small units that frees up a dozen family houses is a striking return on a relatively small site.
Yet the council confirmed it is receiving no funding from the Department of Housing for these pilots and will pay for them itself. Councillors from different parties agreed unanimously to write to the Ministers for Finance and Housing seeking a national scheme. They are right to do so. A funding system geared almost entirely towards counting new units does not easily reward a project whose main output is a better-used existing home.
There are fair counter-arguments. Rightsizing schemes can be slow to fill, because moving is a big decision late in life and must always be voluntary. One-bedroom units may suit some tenants but not others who want a spare room for a carer or visiting family. And every euro a council spends here is a euro not spent elsewhere. A Fine Gael councillor raised another question worth exploring, whether private owners who want to downsize could sell to the local authority and move into these purpose-built schemes, which would widen the benefit but also the cost and complexity.
None of these objections is a reason not to proceed. They are reasons to design the schemes well, to offer tenants genuine choice and support, and to measure the results. My view is that Cork has identified something every local authority should be doing, and that the Department should treat rightsizing as core housing supply rather than a local experiment. If a handful of well-placed town-centre blocks can return dozens of family homes to use, that is housing delivery by any reasonable definition, and it deserves to be funded as such.
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