This article is from page 15 of the 2012-04-03 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 15 JPG
THE affects of the building boom have been hammered home with the findings of the 2011 Census, which have revealed that there are now over 11,000 houses in the county with no one living in them.
The official 2011 Census returns which were published by the Central Statistics Office last Thursday revealed that there are now 42, 534 houses occupied in Clare, but that there are 11,782 unoccupied.
These figures mean that the va- cancy rate among houses and flats in the county is now running at nearly 21.2 per cent, 7.5 per cent higher than the national average of 14.7 per cent, with the western seaboard being the worst part of the county affected.
The county’s population increased by five per cent between 2006 and 2011, but despite the upward graph that gives the county the highest population it has had in over a century, there are more houses than ever vacant.
This can be directly attributed to the building boom that took place in the county – with one statistic emerging from the Census returns being that there are more vacant family homes in the county now than there are vacant holiday homes.
The numbers of vacant houses is 5,936, while there are a further 1,236 flats unoccupied, while the number of holiday homes in the county stands at 4,610.
The Census figures revealed that the number of new housing stock in Clare increased by 14 per cent in between the 2006 and 2011 censuses, which means that Clare house builds ran ahead of the national average of 13.3 per cent.
However, the breakdown of these figures have also revealed that this in housing numbers has contributed to a sharper increase in the number of vacant dwellings around the county.
A map of the county produced by the CSO shows that vacancy rates in west and north Clare are now run ning at over 25 per cent.
Only seven other counties have higher rates of vacant housing than in Clare, with Leitrim topping the league table with 30.4 per cent, while within Munster, Kerry on 26.5 per cent is the county with a higher rating than Clare.