Roscommon has high rate of detached houses and few apartments

Quiz question: which Irish county has the lowest level of apartments among its housing stock? While some might suggest Leitrim or Donegal for this title, the correct answer is, in fact, Roscommon where just 2.3% of all dwellings are apartments. That was one of the findings in the latest batch of results from Census 2011. The findings also showed that, when holiday homes were excluded, Tulsk was the village with the highest housing vacancy rate (51%) in the country. Meanwhile Castlerea was one of the towns with the lowest rate of internet connection in the country - as close to half of households there (43%) had no connection to the world wide web. The total number of households occupied by residents in Roscommon increased by 14.4% in the five year period following the census of 2006. There were 20,624 households in Roscommon in 2006 but this had risen to 23,601 by 2011. Roscommon had the second highest rate of detached or one-off houses in the country, after Galway. Some 54% of households in the county were detached houses. While oil was the most popular type of central heating fuel used in the county, heating 59.5% of all homes, a relatively high proportion of homes (29.5%) were reliant on solid fuels (coal, peat and wood pellets) for central heating. Over half of all households - 13,088, or 55.5% - used an individual septic tank in the county. While the number of housholds the county with access to public sewerage schemes has increased in recent times it stands at just 16%, which is one of the lowest rates in the country.