The year is 2050 and a local historian asks how I whiled away the empty hours during the Great Pandemic. Did I learn a new language, finally read Ulysses, or master the piano after abandoning the instrument 25 years earlier?
No, my child. I spent my lockdown evenings mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, ogling photos of other people's newly painted kitchens and gardens transformed by outdoor seating and makeshift bars made from pallets."
Confined to staring at our own four walls, the national appetite for stocking up on loo rolls was swiftly replaced by a longing for paint. One relative with a shed well-stocked with partly used tins of paint took her mind off lockdown by spending weeks painting her entire home - right down to the skirting, the doors, the kitchen and utility units, and the patio table.
When there was no surface left to paint, she turned her attention to some of the town's vacant and derelict houses. I was drafted in to help, despite expressing a preference for literally watching paint dry.
When lockdown lifted and the paint once again began to flow, the town's business people made over their own shop fronts and restaurants. But as the economic effects of Covid-19 began to snarl through main street, the shutters came down on a handful of businesses for good.
For rural towns and villages facing depopulation, their survival depends on new ideas and fresh blood. In the short term, this means enhancing streetscapes to attract passing domestic tourists and urgently tackling the scourge of vacant homes that are being left to rot.
The Covid-19 crisis also presents an opportunity, with towns from Kinsale to Malahide shoring up their economies by reclaiming parking spaces for outdoor dining. Likewise, local authorities need funding to enable towns and villages to harness the giant global experiment that is remote working: whole swathes of workers are determined not to return to spending two hours a day commuting to and from city-centre offices, when they could buy a house in the centre of a rural town, save it from the threat of dereliction and work from home.
Vacant homes in rural towns and villages are low-hanging fruit in the quest to solve the housing crisis. With the Covid-19 restrictions having stymied the delivery of newly-built homes this year, Housing Minister Darragh O'Brien this week launched the Call For Housing 2020 initiative, namely a call to owners of vacant properties to make them available as social housing because local authorities were "urgently seeking vacant residential properties" to meet housing demand.
There are already a slew of local authority schemes aimed at encouraging owners to refurbish homes they have left idle. But the uptake is low. According to Tom Gilligan, the Mayo County Council Director of Services who runs VacantHomes.ie, where the public can anonymously record empty properties in their locality, there are myriad reasons why owners don't participate.
"We are finding a lack of motivation for people to bring property back into use," he says. "Some believe renting out the property wouldn't be worthwhile because of the high tax on rental income. There are properties that are tied up in probate, there isn't a clear title, or there is a family dispute over ownership."
Under the Repair and Lease scheme, a local authority or an approved housing body can provide funding of up to €40,000 towards the cost of repair work. In return, the property must be made available for social housing for at least five years. But in some areas, that amount doesn't even cover the cost of refurbishing the property and there is a shortage of skilled labour to do so, Gilligan says.
An Indecon report for the last finance minister recommended local authorities undergo a large programme of compulsory purchase orders of vacant properties, even if these homes were not suitable for social housing. The councils could then "resell these properties on the open market".
Earlier this month, Independent TD Denis Naughten proposed giving first-time buyers who purchase long-vacant homes in areas suffering from depopulation a Regional Home Regeneration Grant of €15,000 that could be offset against mortgage deposit requirements. He pointed out that there are "a number of rural villages that have high-speed broadband and vacant houses", and that the Government needs to incentivise people to move into these areas and keep rural Ireland alive.
Earlier this month, I boarded a ferry from Kilrush to Scattery Island in the Shannon Estuary. The uninhabited island is home to a monastic settlement founded in the early 6th century by St Senan, a lighthouse with an empty lightkeeper's cottage, a round tower, and a Napoleonic-era artillery battery.
By 1881, the island's population was 141. Many of the families earned their living as river pilots who raced each other whenever a ship appeared in the estuary to clinch the job of leading it safely upriver.
By 1978, the last two residents had abandoned the island for the mainland. The OPW is gradually restoring the stone cottages for the growing number of tourists to Scattery Island and one is already used as a visitor centre.
Unless the new Government immediately gets its act together on vacant properties, the period homes in the centre of rural towns and villages will soon be mere rotting monuments to the past. By the year 2050, visitors will be paying tour guides to learn how the residents of these towns used to live.
