Sligo County Council has been allocated €3.25 million to build 21 new houses.
The money, which is €3.1m to fund a 20 house scheme in Strandhill, and €150,000 for a single house at Culleens, has been described as part of the first phase of the Government’s Social Housing Strategy.
Last month it was announced that the government was prepared to invest over €20m in providing new social housing in the county and Sligo County Council was set a target of providing over 300 homes in a combination of building, buying and leasing schemes.
The aim is to accommodate 39% of the 1,070 people currently on the housing list in Sligo between now and 2017.
Fine Gael Deputy Tony McLoughlin said this “is the first major investment in local authority housing for many years”.
He said this is “just one of the ways that we will be delivering social housing units”.
Labour Senator Susan O’Keeffe described it as “welcome news” and that it represented a good start to the Government’s six-year strategy to deliver 35,000 new social housing units throughout Ireland by 2020.
