any apartment in a ghost estate outside in a rural area needs to be demolished, apartments have no place in rural areas. knock them and leave the houses in the ghost estate and landscape up the areas where the apartments have been demolished or add playgrounds.

When you consider the waste and the misallocation of resources that all these represent, compounded by Brian Lenihan and FF bailing out the developers behind most of these, with tax payers cash, then hiring them as consultants with tax payers cash, while ordinary people live on pence and are booted out of their own homes and suffer from the economic collapse.

To be a member of that party, to vote for them, is to be the lowest form of life that can be found in the gutter.

I know of loads of apprentices that cant finish there time cause theres no work!get them in and give them an extra few pound on there dole and sign them off on there apprenticeship.

I realise a fair amount of these estates are in the middle of a field with no amenities and do therefore not qualify for proper housing.
However a lot more estates could easily be used to reduce the vast numbers of people on housing lists and also the huge amount of people being paid rent supplement.
Surely at the very least each estate should be surveyed and a report drawn up as to their suitability for the above purpose? Individual county councils would engage in both of labour to complete task and actually housing some of the many people on their lists.
It should also be a condition that the labour used to accomplish the task MUST come from the many skilled folk who are on the dole , it’s a win win scenario. Sadly this would involve inter action between various differing governmental depts at once and we are fairly crap at this in this country. For once though let’s make it happen!!

And yet not one planner will be sacked or councillor
And yet the council still have the same amount of people working in the planning offices twiddling their thumbs!!

Thank you Fianna Fail.

Living in a ghost estate and I would like to find out if my estate is on this list? We’re can I find that out??

I’d hardly call that progress.

We could have used the billion handed over to bondholders last week to take 10,000 construction workers off the dole to finish the most viable of these estates, then offered the houses to rent to couples who are being refused mortgages but have jobs, providing an ongoing stream of revenue for the state.

i read this while admiring my glorified chicken coop that i proudly bought during the boom. Wouldnt mind as much if it was built right but a one legged koala bear would have done a better job.

The only time they’ll be justifiably able to say ‘progress’ is being made is when

1. The run down, dangerous estates built in flood plains and so forth are bulldozed

2. the semi-complete estates are brought up to scratch and have people on social housing lists housed in them and the same done with the already habitable estates

3. the crooks who rezoned the land for brown envelopes are jailed

what about all the unfinished estate that aren’t “technically” ghost estates as laid down by the super strict criteria the government set. The developer of my unfinished estate went missing with all the money he made 7 years ago. In the meantime the receiver has been in “negotiations” with kildare county council since then with neither side willing or wanting to solve the problem!

These estates should be used for municipal housing. County councils would then have a means to create employment and generate income from rented units. Local housing projects, would give people so many benefits and these resources shouldn’t be wasted so as to keep other house prices artificially high. I agree those that invested in homes at the peak have lost so much but destroying these estates is biting our nose off to spite our faces. Unfortunately 5 years have passed and still nothing done more than the making of a list, while many valuable properties that we have already paid for are wasted by the state.

Knock them down,take the hit (which has already been taken). Once the over supply has been reduced, house prices will rise again because demand will be there. Obviously not at the same rate by any means in the past. The desolate ghost estates only become eye sores and drag prices down in the area!

the estate they are talking about in portarlington is not fit for purpose and should be demolished.They should look to rehouse the current residents, social and private. Currently majority of the empty units have been broken into stripped of anything valuable such as copper boilers and radiators. Due to this there has been leaks in allot of them which are now covered in black mold which is a health risk to all its residents and their children. There are also a few of them the the ceilings have fallen down. then the apartments that have been left open are now attracting anti social behaviour in the estate. the roads are another problem as many residents have had damage to their cars as the man holes are not level with the road. the list goes on and on.

One sure fire way to ensure that those of us who were priced out of the property boom and now squeezed by the credit crunch will never be able to own our own homes.