Cllr Angela Feeney welcomes Kildare County Council’s recent announcement that it has signed a contract with Cunningham Contracts Group to construct 65 new social housing units and associated site works at Old Greenfields/Fitzgerald Close, Maynooth. However, Cllr. Feeney says it is only a drop in the ocean, given that we have over 7,000 people on the social housing list in Kildare.
Cllr. Feeney lives next door to the development site and has, for many years, represented hundreds of social housing applicants as a public representative. She knows that these housing units are much needed.
The big question for Maynooth is where the next development site is and why it has been almost thirty years since the town’s last phase of social housing was built.
This is why Cllr. Feeney has submitted a motion to the Council calling for an update on current social housing proposals and their stage in the current four-stage approval process. Cllr. Feeney is also calling for an overview of the time it takes for social housing applications to progress from submission to approval by the Department of Housing.
“If you take this current development next door to me, the application was submitted in 2017, and the houses will be ready to be occupied in late 2025, all going well. That’s not even considering the years the land purchase took before the application. It’s unacceptable when people are crying out to be housed that delivering houses takes this long. There is too much red tape, which needs to be addressed if this government is serious about tackling this crisis.”
Cllr. Feeney said it is good to hear that all the dwellings will be built to an A BER rating and that 13 of them will adhere to Universal Design standards and be age-friendly, enabling older adults to continue living independently.