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PLANS TO UTILISE Ireland’s canals for residential use by increasing houseboat capacity along waterways could take between five to seven years due to planning issues, an Oireachtas committee has heard.
Green Party TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh said barge living could form one part of the solution, stating that houseboat living is popular in Manchester, London and Birmingham.
During an Oireachtas committee hearing yesterday, he questioned Waterways Ireland, asking if it has investigated whether it there is capacity to provide more housing on our canals.
“We’re in the middle of a housing crisis… I don’t think this is craziness,” he said, stating that barge and houseboat living can be quite suitable for small families, older couples, or single people.
“There is more capacity – the issue for us is around planning, land, ownership,” said John McDonagh, CEO of Waterways Ireland.
The committee was told that an investment programme for more houseboats on Irish canals is in draft form with a goal to increase the provision of serviced moorings to cater for an additional 170 houseboats.
“It’ll take us between five and seven years to develop that because houseboat moorings are subject to planning permission,” Éana Rowe, Operations Controller for Waterways Ireland told the committee.
Lands also need to be identified that might be made available to develop marinas that could cater for a sizable number of house boats.
Currently, the only serviced moorings for houseboat living is in Sallins in Kildare, at Shannon Harbour, and also Grand Canal Dock in Dublin.
A serviced mooring site gives access to a water tap and electricity point for each houseboat. Electricity is not included in the permit fee. Residents use a top up card to pay for their electricity usage.
Refuse is collected at the Grand Canal and a pump out station for waste is located on the opposite side of the marina. However the services provided vary in different locations.
Ó Cathasaigh said he knew of one couple who lived happily on a houseboat for many years before starting their family.
“There’s a lot of people who live very comfortably [on houseboats],” he said, stating that the expansion of housing on our canals should be investigated.
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We’ll call it a house boat river tax tax.
Can we just get the fencing gone first? Patrick Kavanagh must be turning in his grave
Perhaps this is part of the solution, I spent a night on a narrow boat yonks ago, it was someone’s home, party in London, at 6″2 inside wasn’t easy so spent most of the night outside including sleeping, toilet was a challenge….I didn’t ask how the debris was treated but it was different times……
If they allowed it and Sallins does look well, what safeguards would be there for waste ? Coz we really don’t any more pollution in our waterways.
@Paul O’Mahoney: Loads of potential in and around Sallins, 15 minute train ride to the city, they need to double the size of the car park tho. Park and ride on a few direct links would be great, Naas/Sallins are pretty much the out boundary of the city now (sorry Kildare peeps)
@Thesaltyurchin: And it’s now bypassed it’s such a nice village but could be so much better. I actually prefer it to Naas but it needs work.
@Paul O’Mahoney: You’re taking shizer
Can’t see , The friends of the Irish environment, agreeing to this. They prevented Roscommon Co Council putting a drainage pipe to relieve flooding of dwelling houses, so any interference with canals will spend years in the courts.
@Max: they could install septic tanks and that might work, Electricity could be a wind turbine solar panels at harbours charging batteries that would be simply be clipped into the boats system.
I see a lot of boats that have small solar panels and wind turbines so the batteries might be similar.
This type of living is not uncommon in Europe how do they manage I wonder.
@Paul O’Mahoney: They would pump it ashore or onto a tank on a small barge
@Paul O’Mahoney: the mad things is that a lot of it is proven to work across Europe, but here we cling to ‘no’ as the default to any idea that changes the status quo.
@Thesaltyurchin: in Ireland the complicated solution is always favoured over an easy approach
Makes sense, but really would love to see commercial application in this space, moving some freight transport off commuter roads. Alas politician’s are spineless in the face of industry.
@Thesaltyurchin: Unfortunately the process is too slow to meet today’s deadlines. A canal boat laden with goods will likely struggle to get more than 4 knots. Then you have locks to contend with every so often
@Daniel Killeen: There are different types of of ‘need’ where goods, supplies and materials are concerned, not everything is needed right away, constants just keep coming, building supplies, etc. Other countries already do this quite successfully so really none of this is new, this along with rail at night would contribute greatly to easing some of the port que on the M roads around Dublin. They should move the port as has been suggested to better facilitate these ideas, move it closer to rail, etc. While opening up a whole new non brownfield site for development (again not my suggestion, but woudl agree with it.
@Thesaltyurchin: Right, let them think about it for 10 years, then not do that, while blocking any simple mooring arrangements. It’s surreal. Amsterdam is streets ahead of us and we can’t even manage to plan an extra 170 sites where people supply their own housing.
@Daniel Killeen: That’s BS, boats are still widely used in mainland Europe.
@Alex: Our canals arent the same size as those in mainland Europe though are they? 60ft x 13.5ft x 6ft is the biggest you can fit into our locks. Doesnt compare to a truck in any way
Responsibility for the Dublin canals should be removed from Waterways Ireland and returned to DCC they have contributed to the HousingCrisis with their incompetence and failure to develop the potential
@Cormac McKay: Eh DC are the housing authority for the city, if anyone has contributed to the housing crisis it’s them, how many vacant homes do DCC own?
@Cormac McKay: It wasn’t Waterways Ireland that wanted a white water rafting yoke in the IFSC , speaking of which have they ever actually put water back into that part , next to the CHQ building.
@The next small thing: Unfortunately our local government democracy is completely ineffective and is at the whim of multiple Ministers
Until we get our DirectlyElectedMayorforDublin someone with Vision Ambition and Pride in the capital don’t expect anything to change
@Cormac McKay: Ha, most self serving post ever
So this explains why they are increasing the mooring fees 1500%
Get BAM on the job, be ready in 25 years, no bother!
Basically caravans on the river, however initially glamorous it appears. If caravans on land were suggested for future living I think we’d balk.
Of course there would need to be a tax, levy or whatever to pay for the infrastructure.
Without such a tax, and funds from the exchequer, then any sites could quickly descend into the way halting sites for travellers are treated.
So all the gombeens we recently voted for in local elections can’t do anything in a reasonable time frame
Say all the barge owners are going to be delighted, when their barges suddenly rise in value, like the million pound barges in London. Haha don’t think so.
Need to think bigger than barges. I visited this floating community in Amsterdam 2 yrs ago. Houses there now about 10yrs. Very comfortable and sustainable.
https://schoonschipamsterdam.org/en/#mk-footer
You would think, a member of the flippin’ “Green” Party, would have the cop-on to be declaring war on Canals! Not encouraging their ongoing and sustaned proliferation. We ALL know that the *man made* scouring of the land and it’s ecosystems (i e. canals) has done extensive and sustained long-term damage to our natural environment and habitats.
It is the *duty* of the so-called “Green” Party, all environmentalists, conservationists and, simply, just all those whom are Irish and have an implicit inborn love-of-the-land, the reclaimed land, the land re-acquired from 900years of British harm – it is our collective *duty* to restore it to what it was, and what it should be.
That stretches from *man-made* canals, to *man-made* structural impositions on natural coastal and/or river erosion, and flooding, and deposition.
If “House Boats” are to be built anywhere on this island, then they should be built (obviously) where lands and homes frequently flood.
The most obvious of such places being – Lough Funshinagh.
And, if anyone bothered to take a second, overview look at the West of Ireland, of Connaught, maybe we might begin to recognise that it is possible, probably even likely, that the island of Ireland is breaking up and has been for Centuries.
Perhaps the multitude of lakes, rivers, streams, waterbodies and Turloughs, are less indicative of Cromwellian “hellish, unfarmable, wetlands” and more indicative of multiple millenia’s *END* to continuous solid earth?
The opposite of Netherlands’ initial and natural drop in sea levels, exposing additional landmass (500B-500AD?).
Maybe “Turloughs”, like Lough Funshinagh, are a consequence of sea-level/sea-based flooding? Or sea levels choking or backwashing natural inland aquifers and/or natural runoff (i.e. rivers, foliage+bog absorption, and evaporation).
Maybe the majority of Connaught is doomed to become a Wetland Swamp?
After all, nowhere else in the world – literally nowhere else!! – has the Turlough phenomenon.
It is, therefore, a National disgrace that any indigenous Irish citizen should have a hand in obstructing or destroying them with man-made interventions(incl canals?), rather than being an International Leader in the extensive, exclusive and **first time** study&research projects into the “disappearing lakes”.
Who knows, maybe they are a phenomenon that will arise in other Nations, or islands, as sea levels and climate shifts.
Either way, if anywhere ought to have “floatable homes”, it is surely locations that require agile – not beligerantly obstructive – responses to irregular, regular, an extreme, natural phenomena.
Homes, and human infrastructures, that go *with* Nature.
Not *against* it.
@Pink Freud: Wow , have you ever heard of paragraphs?
@Pink Freud: what a load of cods wallop.
it will because any official involved be it planning or waterways ireland is “working from home ” aka walking the dog and cutting the grass .the country has ground to a halt with this rubbish and no elected official has the balls to change it .
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