Tenants still waiting to move into new Athlone estate

Tenants who were told early last year that they had been allocated a home in a new social housing development in Athlone are still waiting to move in.

A contract was signed for the construction of 24 new homes at Greally Park in Arcadia more than two and a half years ago, in June 2023.

While the project has been close to completion for many months now, applying the finishing touches to ready the units for occupation has taken longer than expected.

Local councillor Aengus O'Rourke said people on the council's social housing waiting list were told close to a year ago that they would be moving into Greally Park.

At a council meeting last June, he was informed it would likely be the autumn of 2025 before the units were ready for occupation. But, with the new year now well underway, it remains the case that no tenants have moved in.

The latest update from Director of Services Jackie Finney was that it's expected to be "early in the second quarter" of this year - most likely April - before the first home is occupied.

Cllr O'Rourke expressed frustration with the length of time the completion of the housing project was taking.

"Greally Park has taken far too long to complete, in my view, for the scale of the development that it is," he said.

He acknowledged that the pace of the completion works did seem to pick up in recent months.

"It seems like they have accelerated the completion works on it. In the course of the last couple of months I have seen more activity there than I had seen before," he said.

"Tenants were informed, I'd say 10 or 11 months ago, that this was where they would be moving to. So I think the delay has even caught the council out - they wouldn't have allocated these units to people if they thought it was going to take the guts of a year before the units would be ready.

"It's very disappointing," he commented. "People should be well in there, which would have freed up the homes they came from. That natural life-cycle of people moving into new accommodation just hasn't happened, and it's frustrating."

Greally Park is located across from Arcadia Retail Park and what will be the new Athlone Community Nursing Unit. It's adjacent to the Ashdale estate and to Esker Park, a 33-home council development that was completed in 2020.

The 24 homes in Greally Park comprise a mixture of 11 two-bedroom houses, 4 two-bedroom apartments, 4 two-bedroom duplexes and 5 one-bedroom apartments.

The naming of the estate honours Hannah Greally, an Athlone native who wrote a best-selling book, 'Bird's Nest Soup', about the 18 years she spent incarcerated in St Loman's psychiatric hospital in Mullingar. She died in 1987, at the age of 62.