Barry Ward
speaker
554 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Barry Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The government is absolutely right to target this.
The way they did it was to put in place a charge on the people who own those properties to penalise them for not acting and not using those properties and putting them into use.
That is absolutely the right policy.
In order for that policy to work, it has to be enforced.
And what the Tánaiste and the government generally has recognised is the fact that there are about 19,000 to 20,000 properties nationally that are in a derelict condition.
There are about 2,000 that are actually on the register.
And of those 2,000 on the register, some local authorities are not collecting the tax.
So the very disincentive the government is trying to put in place to bring these buildings back into use is not being affected at local government level.
So you can understand the frustration.
They're absolutely right to act on it if it's not working and change it.
And therefore, I think what the Tanya just said is fair enough.
Well, Padraig mentioned the X number of council houses that are there at the moment.
I think that's a slightly disingenuous figure because when somebody vacates a local authority house, it has to be renovated for the next document.
That takes time.
It's something I worked on when I was in the council.
We had the quickest turnaround of those buildings in Dunedin when I was there.
to renovate a local authority.
It takes three weeks in the private sector.
Yeah, and it takes less, by the way, in Dunedin.
The point that I'm making is if at a given time there's a certain number of houses being renovated there, that is not contributing to the problem because they're going to come on stream very soon.
Showing 101–120 of 554 · page 6 of 28
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