‘No room at the inn’ for tourism workers
A housing shortage for potential hotel and restaurant workers and others engaged in tourism has created a mini-crisis on the peninsula, even before the peak season kicks in.
The town and its peninsula villages are attracting around one million visitors yearly.
Locals say the season has started earlier this year with Dingle, on the Wild Atlantic Way route, thronged since St Patrick’s Day, due to its huge exposure last year through Star Wars filming and the BBC’s Top Gear programme.
The Chamber of Commerce in Dingle has already pleaded with owners of vacant properties to make them available for long-term rent.
The mayor of Kerry, Michael O’Shea, says planning is a key issue in resolving the issue while a leading restauranteur warned there was no point attracting extra tourists if there was no accommodation for staff.
Cllr O’Shea claimed no houses had been built in Dingle since 2009.
Last year, he suggested a vacant community hospital in Dingle should be transferred from the HSE and renovated to provide social housing and accommodation for seasonal workers.
However, the proposal was rejected.
“There’s no room available at the inn,” he said.
“Physically there is no room. We will have to loosen planning, expand the town boundaries.”
However, any plans for rezoning in Dingle will not take place for some time as the development plans for the main hubs, Tralee and Killarney, had to be considered first, he said.
“We will just have to re-examine zoning in Dingle,” he said.
In recent years, planning for a number of proposed developments were refused, particularly on the Milltown side of Dingle.
Locals claim the planning decision were “coming back to haunt the council and the town, now”.
Meanwhile, Killarney is also experiencing difficulties in staff accommodation and adverts have appeared in local news sheets asking householders if they have rooms available.
In Dingle, however, Martin Bealin of the Global Village Restaurant said the shortage of staff accommodation was “a massive problem”.
“There’s no point in continually attracting tourists to the town if we don’t have places for workers to live.”
He said the entire infrastructure in Dingle needed a serious look from parking to traffic arrangements.
Jitka Svobodova, a mother-of-two who works in the Global Village Restaurant, said securing accommodation in Dingle depended on word of mouth. “You must know people and find out about a property before it is advertised,” she said.
In Dingle town, tenants renting are paying up to €1,300 a month for a modest house, twice the average of many locations in the county.
Ms Svobodova said she had personal experience of the housing shortage when she had to move house last year.
The only property available, she said, was in Annascaul. She has, however, since secured a house closer to work but said several colleagues are now having difficulty.
