Unlikely developers build affordable homes in Ringsend to help local people remain within the community.
Poolbeg Quay in Ringsend is a Dublin 4 housing development with a difference. The scheme ensures houses are allocated to people in the community at affordable prices.
The brainchild of Linda McMahon and Catherine Gorman of the City Housing Initiative, the most unlikely developers in the country. They set themselves the task of building houses to keep local people within their community.
The lucky buyers, are all applicants under the Dublin City Council affordable housing scheme and from the locality. The buyers will pay under €150,000 for two-bedroom apartments with balconies, or three-bedroom townhouses and just under €190,000 for two-bedroom penthouses with roof gardens. Down the road from the Poolbeg Quay development, two-bedroom apartments are on sale for €380,000.
Sharon McCormack, her husband, and two children have moved from a one bedroom rented flat to her own three-bedroom house with a garden in Poolbeg Quay.
This is heaven.
Linda McMahon remembers young people started to leave the area when Dublin 4 house prices began to soar in the mid 990s. Some schools in the area are now closing down due to declining numbers. Similarly, the local GAA club, Clan na Gael Fontenoy is losing players because,
Some of the young people they have to go to Navan and Drogheda and different places.
Catherine Gorman sees when people are housed it has the knock on effect of flats being freed and more people being able to live in rental housing.
It’s just absolutely brilliant and I think that’s our payback.
It is hoped that the Poolbeg Quay housing scheme will inspire other communities to follow suit.
An RTÉ News report broadcast on 14 October 2004. The reporter is Anne-Marie Smyth.
