New social houses in Ballina have been compared to Disneyland by a local Independent councillor.
Councillor Gerry Ginty believes the colour scheme adopted by Mayo County Council for the houses at Marian Crescent resemble the world famous theme park and are an eyesore for locals and passers by.
The Ballina based councillor welcomed the newly built houses and apartments as a badly needed development in the north Mayo town, but said he was not impressed by their blue and yellow colour scheme: “I’m not impressed at all. The houses are well designed, well built, and very very badly needed in the town cause there is a housing crisis really in Ballina. The usual idea when you build social houses is to make them part of the streetscape or the area they are built in but with these houses the design was fine and everything else was fine until they went and painted them in a strange shade of blue which makes them stand out completely from all the other houses on either side. The people of the area had absolutely no objections to the houses being built, as a matter of fact they welcomed it, but I’ve never got as many complaints from members of the public about anything in the town as I have about this because people think it’s rather obscene.”
He says the final straw was the multi-coloured panels added to the front gates of the properties last week: “It was bad enough to have this strange colour scheme on the houses but then you had some of the doors painted a canary yellow and various different colours. It looks a little like Disneyland. Then it even got worse when they put small gates on the front of the houses last week and on the gates they have put flat panels of different colours. It’s completely out of place and out of sync with the local area. I think it’s totally wrong and it’s not encouraging people to welcome social housing into their area and I think for the people who are going to have to live there I don’t think they’ll be too happy to be living in those stand out houses.”
He continued: “I cannot understand it at all, it’s not for aesthetics, in fact it’s the complete opposite of that. I’ve called on Mayo County Council several times to change the colour scheme and I think they should before the houses are occupied. I think the council owes it to the people who are going to live in the houses and the people in the area and even the people who have to pass by every day. Every time you pass it jars with the senses when you see those colours and I call on Mayo County Council to put a proper colour scheme there and remove the Disneyland panels from the gates.”
