A Donegal County Councillor has reiterated his call for high-quality log cabins and modular homes to be built to house people in need.
Independent Cllr Michael McBride has been campaigning for almost a year for the provision of log cabins to accommodate Mica families.
Now, with the arrival of refugee families from Ukraine, Cllr McBride has asked the council to act now to facilitate the building of such homes. He raised a motion at today’s sitting of Donegal County Council to ask the council to amend the current County Development Plan allowing Log cabins and Modular Homes to be built in Donegal.
Cllr McBride said he has been approached by people offering sites for log cabins, and warned that if the council is not proactive about housing there are going to be “serious problems”.
Cllr McBride said there is even more demand for homes with the number of Ukrainian refugees coming to Ireland.
“We have mass emigration of the people of the Ukraine across Europe. We are told by government that 200,000 are coming to our shore. We don’t have the accommodation. In Letterkenny, they are staying in a hotel. These are people that lived a perfectly normal life, like most of us do, and they are going to need somewhere to live. A lot of these people will have no homes to go back to”
Cllr McBride said the “time is right” to have a hard discussion to put in alternative accommodation that is workable.
The council is in the process of setting up a Special Project Delivery Team to examine modular construction and some preliminary examinations of modular home options have been carried out. The Council is also reviewing expressions of interest from land and property owners to sell land to the Council.
Following recent advice provided by the Department of Housing, Planning & Local Government, the Council is awaiting amendments to legislation providing exemptions enabled under Section 181of the Planning Act to facilitate measures that respond to the needs associated with facilitating emergency accommodation.
