SLIGO, Ireland — The house on Wine Street had been empty since 2009, when the last tenant left and the owner, who lived in Boston, stopped answering letters. Its roof had a hole; its ground floor, a former shop, had a pigeon problem. Last month, a couple in their 30s and their two children moved into the top two floors, and the ground floor is a bicycle repair shop. The difference was 70,000 euros from the Irish state and about 110,000 from the couple’s savings and a mortgage.
“Without the grant, this building would have fallen down. We looked at it in 2022 and walked away,” said Aoife Gilmartin, 34, a primary school teacher, who with her husband, Conor, a carpenter, bought the house for 95,000 euros in 2024. “With it, we have a four-bedroom house in the middle of town for less than a new build on the ring road.”
Ireland’s Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant, introduced in 2022 and expanded twice since, pays up to 50,000 euros to anyone restoring a home empty for two years or more, and up to 70,000 if the property is derelict. The money is paid on completion, against receipts, and the owner must live in the house or rent it out for at least five years. The housing department said last week it had approved 14,200 applications and paid out on 6,800, with the rest in progress.
County Sligo, population 70,000, has approved 612, the most per head in the country. Its county council attributes the figure to a long history of emigration that left houses in the names of people who never came back, to property prices low enough that the grant is a large share of the total, and to a dedicated officer, Margaret Tiernan, whose job for three years has been to track down absent owners. “I have written to Australia, Canada, three American states and a man in Bahrain,” she said. “Most of them did not know what they owned. Some of them cried.”
The effect on the town center is visible. Sligo’s main streets had 41 vacant upper floors in a 2021 survey; a count in September found 17. Three derelict shops on O’Connell Street are now homes with businesses below. The council has used a related scheme to compulsorily purchase nine buildings whose owners could not be found and sell them, with the grant attached, to buyers who commit to living in them.
The program has critics. Housing economists point out that the money, about 450 million euros so far nationally, goes to people who already have the capital to buy and the patience for an 18-month renovation, and that the rental requirement is lightly policed. “It is a good scheme for the middle class and for the streetscape,” said Dr. Rónán Ó Dálaigh, who studies housing policy at the University of Galway. “It is not a scheme for the 13,000 people in emergency accommodation. We should be honest about which problem it solves.”
Builders are also scarce. Mr. Gilmartin, who did much of the work himself, said the family waited seven months for a roofer. The housing department acknowledged in its report that completion times averaged 16 months, against a planned 12.
On Wine Street, Ms. Gilmartin was unbothered. “It took forever and it cost more than we thought,” she said. “And now I walk to work, the children walk to school, and the house that was a hole in the street is a house again. The ring road can keep its new builds.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 5 of the European edition with the headline: Ireland Paid 70,000 Euros to Bring an Empty House Back. In Sligo, 600 Owners Said Yes..
