SM20141117Republic081
Ballaghadereen.Co. Roscommon. Republic of Ireland. 11/17/2014
A housing estate with some of the houses boarded-up outside the town of Ballaghadereen.
A massive surplus of housing , combined with the late 2000s recession resulted in a large number of estates being abandoned, unoccupied, partially occupied or uncompleted. In 2010 there were more than 600 so called ghost estates in Ireland, and a governement agency report estimated the number of empty houses in Ireland at greater than 300,000. The report for 2015 lists the number of vacant homes in unfinished estates to be 2,542. Vacant homes do not include derelict houses and homes under construction.
From the book The Republic (Allen Lane, 2016) Seamus Murphy's personal and immediate look at his native Ireland on the eve of the 100th anniversary of its revolutionary Easter Rising, which paved the way for independence for the south of the island, the Republic of Ireland.