This article is from page 12 of the 2012-09-04 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 12 JPG
THE full extent of the building boom that was experienced in Clare during the Celtic Tiger years has been revealed in the latest bulletin report released by the Central Statistics Office on the 2011 census returns for the county.
Figures for Clare have shown that in the 20-year period from 1991 to 2011, there was a 76 per cent increase in the number of houses in the county from 31,606 to 55,616 – statistics that paint a picture of the biggest building boom in the county’s history over a period in which the population grew by over 15,000.
The 2011 figures show that housing stock in the county now sits at 55,616. Of this figure 42,534 of the houses are occupied, which means that there is a vacancy rate of 21.2 per cent in the county, which represents over one fifth of the county’s housing stock know lies vacant.
This figure can be directly attributed to the building boom that took place in the county, with the number of houses being build over a ten-year period from 1996 to 2006 illustrating the scale of the property industry in the county at the height of the building boom. In 1991 there were 31,606 houses in Clare when there was a vacancy rate of 14.6 per cent. The number of houses increased by less than 3,000 over the next five years until 1996, while the vacancy rate dropped to 12.8 per cent.
However, from 1996 onwards there was a massive increase in construction, with 7,124 new houses built over a five-year period, which had the knock-on effect of bumping vacancy rates up to 16.1 per cent.
This trend continued from 2001 to 2006 when 7,321 new houses were built as vacancy rates jumped to 20.1 per cent. Now there are 55,616 houses in the county, an increase of 24,010 when compared with 1991 figures, but the vacancy rates are now higher than they ever were at 21.2 per cent which translates into 11,782. The numbers of vacant houses is 5,936, while there are a further 1,236 flats unoccupied. 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 be- tween the 2006 and 2011 censuses, which means that Clare house builds ran ahead of the national average of 13.3 per cent.
These figures highlighting Clare’s building boom have been released in the same year that Clare planning was placed in the dock by the heritage watchdog, An Taisce, which published a report saying that Ennis was “an example of some of the most senseless zoning excesses of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ era”.
This damning indictment was delivered in an Taisce’s hard-hitting annual report, ‘State of the Nation – A Review of Ireland’s Planning System 2000-2011’.
Ennis and wider Clare was singled out for special mention in the 45-page report that turned the microscope on 32 planning authorities throughout the country.
Clare has been ranked 23rd out of the 32, the planning in Ennis coming in for special mention because of a range of decisions that were made during the 11-year timeframe covered by the report.
“Clare was the most over-zoned county in the State with 3,208 hectares allowing for an overall additional population of 273,000,” the report said, while noting that between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of all planning decisions in the county was for one-off housing in unzoned land.
In Ennis, An Taisce said that “almost 4, 500 acres of land was zoned for development, sufficient to increase the population of the town from 26,000 people to over 100,000.”