€3,300 collected in Derelict Site Levies in Cork County in 2022
Only one of Cork's eight Municipal districts charged any derelict sites levies at all last year.
Cork County Council collected just €3,300 in Derelict Sites Levies last year, new figures released to Tripe + Drisheen can reveal.
No levies at all were charged in seven out of eight of Cork’s Municipal Districts in 2022.
Kanturk/Mallow was the only Municipal District in the county to charge levies in 2022: they charged €31,150 on the 15 properties which they have registered as derelict. They collected 10.6%, or €3,300, of what they had charged.
Derelict Sites Levies are charged at 7% of the market value of a property annually: the levies, administered and collected by local authorities, are supposed to deter property owners from allowing vacant buildings to fall into disrepair and to encourage homes that are long-term vacant to be brought back into use.
An average of €700 per year for the past six years
Cork County Council had collected just €900 countywide in the five years between 2017 and 2022, The Corkman reported in October 2022.
Even if 2022’s €3,300 saw a substantial increase over this, it still means that the local authority has collected an average of €700 per year for the past six years.
Cork County Council, which does not include Cork City where a separate derelict sites register is in operation, has 59 properties on its derelict sites register countywide despite CSO figures showing that 2,312 houses have been vacant since Census 2011, we reported last week:
Placing a property on the derelict sites register is a necessary precursor to using the Derelict Sites Act of 1990 to charge levies to the property’s owners.
One part time staff member
Cork East TD David Stanton said he was “amazed” that Cork County Council, the local authority with the largest geographical area in Ireland, had not applied for additional funding for staff to tackle vacancy and dereliction while speaking in the Dáil earlier this month.
The Department of Housing has boosted staff funding to tackle dereliction by 20% nationwide this year, recognising that many local authorities, including Cork County Council, had just one part-time staff member working on the issue.
By March 9, Cork County Council had not applied for funding for more staff; Minister for State at the Department of Housing Kieran O’Donnell told the Dáil that it was the responsibility of the local authority to apply for extra resources.
“Regarding a previous question on local authorities applying for additional vacant homes officers, I took it upon myself to make inquiries,” he said. “Cork has yet to make that application. We are awaiting these requests, which have not yet come in.”
Cork County Council’s press office did not respond to Tripe + Drisheen’s request for an interview with the Director of Housing on the issue of county dereliction.
“Prioritising informal communication with property owners (where known) in order to agree on solutions to render sites non-derelict is a current Council priority,” the press office told us in an emailed statement for our previous article. “When such efforts prove ineffective, the formal provisions of the legislation are activated.”