Technical staff from Mayo County Council are currently carrying out a stock survey of the 640 local authority housing units in the West Mayo Municipal District, a meeting of the district was told this week.
Senior staff officer for Mayo County Council, Padraig Brogan, told the elected members that the survey was being carried out “with a view to planned upgrades such as the provision of central heating where there isn’t any and the upgrade of insulation. The next phase will be doors, windows and that kind of thing”.
Sinn Fein councillor Rose Conway Walsh asked at the meeting: “How do we decide which ones are done first and how much money are we looking at in terms of what we have to divide between those 641 units? What am I trying to get at is, the ones that people have been renting over 30 years, where the windows and doors are bad and they have no heating or very little or no insulation either, are we making those a priority?”
Brogan responded to her query saying: “The priority would be for heating where there is none already, and a lot of the houses would have had heating and insulation done as part of the planned maintenance over the last few years. So there would be a small pocket of houses that would require the central heating done as a matter of urgency. The insulation would be the second tier.”
Director of services for Mayo County Council, Martin Keating, added: “The major gap we have is in relation to the central heating in the units have in stock. We have the information, but we do have to go out and check, because some tenants may have carried out modifications and put it in themselves. It isn’t as big a job as it might have seemed to get our information up to date. Our strategy is that we want to get the central heating sorted, that’s a very basic requirement. In most of the stock over the last 10 years, windows, doors, issues with roofs and septic tanks have been in general sorted out. There may be the odd exception here and there where somebody said they didn’t want that work done and abdicated from the programme for a particular reason.”
