Every Irish town has one: the house with the buddleia growing out of the gutter, the shopfront whose faded lettering advertises a business that closed before the euro arrived, the upstairs windows that have been dark for so long that nobody on the street can remember them lit. We have had a law to deal with such places since 1990, and a levy on their owners for most of that time, and yet the buildings remain, with a stubbornness that would be admirable if it were not so expensive for everybody else. This week a software engineer, Michael Gannon, did something that the State has been promising to do for years, which is to put the derelict sites registers kept by local authorities together in one place, on a website that lists more than 2,700 properties around the country.
The numbers he draws from that exercise are worth pausing over. By his estimate, these properties could be worth something over €500 million if they were developed for housing, and their owners owe in the region of €49.5 million in unpaid derelict sites levies. In 64 cases, he reckons, the owner owes more than the property is worth. One does not have to accept every valuation to see the shape of the problem. The levy, at 7 per cent of market value a year, was meant to make holding a derelict building more costly than doing something with it. In practice, it has too often been a bill that was issued, or not issued, and then quietly left to accumulate.
The Government's response, being carried through the Finance Act, is to hand collection of the levy to the Revenue Commissioners. From January, local authorities will be legally obliged to keep a derelict sites list and to send it to Revenue, and owners will have until the middle of 2028 to settle what they owe. A national digital register, with maps and standard details for each property, is to be published annually. It is hard to read this as anything other than a polite expression of frustration with councils, and it is a reasonable one, but it is only half the story.
Anyone who has worked in a planning department knows why derelict sites registers are patchy. Entering a property on the register is a legal process, with notices, objections and the possibility of challenge, and it falls to small teams who are also dealing with unauthorised development, vacant site levies and the ordinary daily traffic of complaints. Ownership is frequently tangled in probate, in family disagreement, or in companies that exist mainly on paper. Collection was harder still, because a council chasing a local owner for a levy is a council chasing a ratepayer and a voter. Moving collection to Revenue removes some of that awkwardness, but it does not remove the need for a council to identify, inspect and formally list the property in the first place, and the new regime will only be as complete as the registers that feed it.
There is also a fair point to be made on the other side. Not every owner of a derelict building is a speculator sitting on a windfall. Some are elderly people who inherited a property they cannot afford to repair; some are waiting on a planning permission, a fire certificate or a builder who never arrives. The State has been more generous here than it is sometimes given credit for: the vacant property refurbishment grant offers up to €70,000 to bring a single property back into use, and investors converting space over shops can now receive up to €135,000. A tougher levy makes sense precisely because the carrot is already on the table.
For planners, the lesson is that dereliction is a land management problem before it is a design problem. A public register is a useful thing in itself, because it lets communities, councillors and would-be buyers see what is sitting idle, and visibility has a way of concentrating minds. But the real test will come in 2028, when we see whether the levies are actually paid, whether properties change hands, and whether the dark windows on our main streets begin, one by one, to light up again. If they do not, the next step will have to be a more confident use of compulsory purchase, and a willingness by local authorities to take on buildings themselves rather than simply recording their decline.
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