“WE had lots of hard questions, we had honest conversations about the amount of money that cities like Limerick need.”
That was the word from Mayor of Limerick John Moran following the inaugural meeting of the Limerick Mayoral and Government Consultative Forum this Friday (March 28), who said that Taoiseach Micheál Martin was “listening very carefully” to his plans and ideas for the Treaty over his term in office as Limerick’s first directly-elected mayor.
The first sitting of the Limerick Mayoral and Government Consultative Forum was held at City Hall on Merchant’s Quay this Friday and saw Mayor Moran and officials from Limerick City and County Council come together with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Housing Minister James Browne, Minister of State at the Department of Housing and Limerick TD Kieran O’Donnell, and Arts, Culture, Communications, Media, and Sport Minister Patrick O’Donovan, also a Limerick TD.
Speaking after what he described as a “historic” first meeting of the forum, Mayor Moran said the Taoiseach was “fully engaged” in the issues brought to the table for Limerick.
Though he is not a regular member of the forum, the Taoiseach said he made the trip to Shannonside for the first sitting as he was “particularly anxious to signal government’s commitment” to the forum and the new Limerick mayoral role.
The Taoiseach said he was committed to “getting up the boat” of Limerick and to work through the issues and “ambitious agenda” Mayor Moran was to put to the government.
“What I’m interested in today is in developing a modus operandi, a process by which government and Limerick can work together in terms of advancing the ambitious agenda that is here,” he told members of the press.
Mayor Moran said that the meeting saw “lots of hard questions, we had honest conversations about the amount of money that cities like Limerick need”.
“It was a discussion about Limerick, a discussion about regional development, and particularly the housing issue,” the Mayor said, adding that “specifically, we pointed out that we want funding”.
‘We want funding’
He told the gathered members of the press that the inaugural meeting was about “the big stuff”, including the Opera site, how to extend rail lines to Shannon and Foynes, and how to be ready for offshore wind energy opportunities.
As regards housing, Mayor Moran said the meeting provided an opportunity to “explain the radical changes we want to make here in Limerick in housing policy, and we made it very clear we want to try different things.”
“Specifically we pointed out that we want funding. I need to get the Opera Centre finshed up, that’s a really important priority.”
He also brought his ambitions for ‘smart’, or modular, homes on Shannonside to the inaugural meeting, a project he has allocated €1.3million of his mayoral funding towards for finding solutions for rapid delivery on state lands.
“We need to have a very big supply of rental accommodation and quickly. We have a Ryder Cup coming, so you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that we use that as a deadline,” the Mayor said.
‘Listening very carefully’
The Mayor has expressed hopes for around 2,000 modular homes spanning three or four storeys at unspecified sites across the city, built with a view to being relocatable in the longer term.
He suggested that the capital cost of the project would be in excess of half a billion euro, far away from his initial investment of €1.3m. However he suggested that full funding does not explicitly need to come from government.
“There’ll be private rent coming in on this. So we’re hoping that what we need is really the equity injection into a vehicle that will allow us to borrow the money that will get paid off,” he said.
“It’s almost very similar to what we would see in public private partnerships, where ultimately the asset gets paid off by the end of the time by people that are coming in and renting the accommodation and just using their monies to do that.”
As regards the larger housing issue long term, Mayor Moran said that the argument made to An Taoiseach and the government was that “if you’re going to build the housing that Limerick needs over the next 15 years, the total build cost of that is about €16billion. The VAT number for that is about two or three billion. And this is money that, in a sense, we need to seek and get access to in order to build the infrastructure we need.”
When asked if the Taoiseach was going to borrow any of his ideas for Limerick at a national level, especially around his plans for modular housing, Mayor Moran said: “I won’t second guess what the Taoiseach was thinking, but with the number of questions I was getting, I think he was listening very carefully.”
