Plans for Limerick site to be used for affordable housing underway

A DESIGN team will soon be appointed to draw up “detailed proposals” for a site in Limerick city ear-marked for affordable housing.

Limerick City and County Council and the Land Development Agency have stated they are “actively progressing plans for housing” on the former Guinness site on Carey’s Road.

The site falls under the Colbert Quarter Vision project, spearheaded by the LDA and developed in partnership with the council, CIE and the HSE, to build affordable housing and amenities on state-owned land within the city centre.

In a joint statement, the council and the LDA said the process involves “careful planning and potentially extending the area earmarked for housing through the possible acquisition of other land adjoining the Guinness lands, which are included in the Colbert Quarter Spatial Framework.”

The two groups made this statement in response to documents released under FOI to Ruairí Fahy, People Before Profit representative for Limerick.

According to these documents, only €180,000 of a €5.8 million grant to develop infrastructure to enable construction on the site has been spent.

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The grant was originally announced in 2019 by the then Housing Minister, Eoghan Murphy, as part of an €84 million package under the Strategic Sites Fund, that would “provide key facilitating infrastructure, on public lands, to support the delivery of affordable homes to purchase or rent.”

In the redacted documents, shared with the Limerick Leader, officials at the Department of Housing and the council discuss a model of funding under which the council retains ownership of the lands but enters into a long-term lease agreement with the LDA.

As funding schemes were being discussed and no decision was taken, an officer in the Local Government Management Agency stated in February 2022 that the council, “are anxious to move with this because if they can’t progress the site, they need to move on from it”.

Ruairí Fahy has called on the government to admit that “the housing model they have been pushing for decades has failed”.

“We need direct build, public housing available to all, regardless of income.”

When initially announced by the LDA in 2020, the project outline stated that 400 homes would be constructed on the proposed sites by 2023.