Prompted by a colleague, I’ve been browsing the CSO Census report, The Roof over our Heads. It is full of information from the Census 2011 on households and housing in Ireland. I’ll probably blog about some of the other material at some point, but I thought it might be useful to point to some of their data on housing vacancy, a familiar topic on this blog.
In the report, the CSO produce an interesting map of all vacant residential address points in the country classified as vacant houses, vacant apartments and holiday homes. There is little chance of identifying individual properties from this map as it is a scale of 1: 1 million, but by plotting the individual units as opposed to shading in areas we can get a sense of the scale of the issue (which in numeric terms is: 168,427 vacant houses; 61,629 vacant apartments; 59,395 holiday homes; out of total stock of 1,994,845 residential units).
Map of vacant properties in Ireland
There is clearly a patterns to holiday homes, concentrating on the coast, as well as the upper and lower Shannon. Vacant apartments are mainly confined to large urban areas. And whilst, there is much media talk at present concerning a shortage of family homes in Dublin, the data reveal there is no shortage of apartments. In fact, there are 16,321 empty apartments in Dublin City, let alone the other Dublin local authorities. As for vacant houses, they are everywhere. The few blank spots are mountains or remote areas.
The CSO report also provide some data on towns with the highest levels of vacancy, both including and excluding holiday homes. The table below lists the seven towns with the highest levels of vacancy excluding holiday homes. In the case of Tulsk and Ballaghaderreen, two places I have some familiarity with, there is a strong correlation with the presence of unfinished estates. However, as we have discussed elsewhere, unfinished estates are just one element of vacancy given that there are only 16,881 vacant properties on such estates, meaning there is a high degree of background vacancy in many locations beyond unfinished estates (see our AIRO VacantIreland interactive mapping tool that let’s you examine vacancy at Small Area level and individual unfinished estates).
Rob Kitchin
Ireland after NAMA 
February 19, 2013 at 8:43 pm
Irish Agri – policy :
Turn good quality agri land into poor quality agri land.
The blank areas remain blanket bog and rock.
Artifical land surfaces Ireland
(Corine land cover)
Y1990 : 1.5% of land cover.
Y2000 : 1.9% of land cover.
Y2006 : 2.3% of land cover.
I imagine few Bogs were built on…… by and large it was the better land.
What a waste.
4.4.3. Increase in Artificial Surfaces
There was almost a 15% increase in artificial surfaces between 2000 and 2006. Most of this increase is explained by the increases in the following (Table 18):
Infrastructure (roads and railways); increase of 23.5 km² or +126.43%
Industrial and Commercial; increase of 17.5 km² or + 21.91%
Mineral extraction sites (quarries and dumps); increase of 12.52 km² or +16.5%
Discontinuous urban (sub-urban housing); increase of 140.45 km² or +14.95%
Click to access CLC2006%20Final%20Report.pdf
The above discontinuous urban (140.5 km²) did the most damage to good agricultural land and also subtracted from the tourist potential of many areas as few people with wealth & taste will spend money in a sub-rural sub standard landscape.
Ireland has now lost much of it tourism to Scotland as a result of the above development