🇪🇺 Week 9 of 26: Placemaking in County Westmeath
Who Can Afford to Move?
“Faigheann cos ar siúl rud nach bhfaigheann cos ina cónaí” – a walking foot finds something the resting foot never would.
🇪🇺 Week 9 of 26: Place Engage arrives in County Westmeath – a county of two large towns, just 202 people apart, one of which crosses the Shannon into another province. But the property finding that shaped the week is a rental one: Westmeath has the second-widest gap in Ireland between what a sitting tenant pays and what a new tenant pays for the same kind of home in the same town: about €350 a month. We tested that baseline with IPAV member Cormac Sheehy MIPAV of Sheehy Meares Real Estate in Athlone.
96,221 people, up 8% since 2016 · over-65s up 26%, against 22% nationally · Athlone 22,869 and Mullingar 22,667, 202 people apart · median house price €321,000, down 1.1% on the year · new-tenancy rents 35.3% above existing tenancies – about €350 a month, the second-widest gap in the State · new tenancies up 11.5% over the year, existing tenancies up 1.7% · 44 homes advertised to rent across the entire county.
Through iProperty Radio, Place Engage is undertaking a non-political placemaking series across 26 counties throughout the 26 weeks of Ireland’s EU Council Presidency. Each county week builds a Placemaking Data Baseline from primary sources before we arrive, and then our time on the ground is spent listening to people to understand where the published record tracks lived experience, and where it doesn’t.
And, crucially, the week started well with breakfast at Tom’s Bar & Bistro in Castlepollard (best french toast of the trip so far!).
A personal note before the data
In every county I try to immerse myself in local radio, read local writers, and listen to local artists. It is the best way to hear what a place is actually talking about in a given week, and it is usually the thing our Placemaking Data Baseline dataset couldn’t possibly cover.
In Westmeath that led somewhere I did not expect. I came across the audiobook of The Place That Has Never Been Wounded by the musician Niall Breslin, assuming a self-help book with some place-based detail attached (always of interest for trauma informed placemaking). But it is not that. It is beautiful, and raw, and deeply reminiscent of growing up in rural Ireland. The genuine surprise for me (someone with no musical inclination at all), was the involuntary effect of the music and compositions on my nervous system – I had to stop listening while driving and wait until the evenings instead, eyes closed. Hearing Michael Harding’s voice in it was a particular treat. I did learn something about Westmeath along the way, and about what an ancient landscape rich with folklore does to the soul of an artist who grew up inside it. But that is not really why I would recommend it, and I would recommend it especially to people who are certain they do not need it!
I mention it before the figures because it embodies what this county does well. Westmeath’s ancient landscape carries its stories openly, and the county lets you walk into them without ceremony. In Crookedwood, a small village beside Lough Derravaragh – the lake where, in the legend, the Children of Lir spent hundreds of years as swans after their stepmother Aoife cursed them – there is a striking timber sculpture of Lir and his children carved into an old oak at the edge of the village. Saint Munna’s fortified 15th-century church sits nearby on monastic ground, and Knockeyon looks down over the whole thing. The village carries an older Irish name, Tigh Munna, from that same 7th-century monastic foundation. No interpretive centre, no barrier, no car park. It is the same instinct as the Hoban arbour in Kilkenny in Week 6: trust the landscape to hold the story, and let the person who slows down find it.
And a lighter marker of the week: the 2026 Rose of Tralee was won by local woman, Caoilfhinn Ní Choiligh, and the local radio commentary around this was a heartwarming reminder of community support and community pride.
Biggest property concern: One county, two rental markets
The gap between what a new tenant pays and what a sitting tenant pays in County Westmeath is 35.3% – around €350 a month. That is the second-widest of any county in Ireland
It is not the result of one number moving. It is the result of two numbers moving at very different speeds: new-tenancy rents rose 11.5% over the year; existing-tenancy rents rose 1.7%..
Translate that into a household. If you are already in a tenancy in Mullingar or Athlone, your rent has barely moved. If you need to move – a new job, a separation, a growing family, a landlord selling up – you step out of one market and into an entirely different one, for the same kind of home on the same kind of street.
Now set it against supply. On a live capture, there were 44 homes advertised to rent long-term across the whole county. Just 44, for 96,221 people.
The real County Westmeath question is not who can afford to pay. It is who can afford to move. For placemaking, that split is the whole point. A county can look stable on its average while the door into it is quietly closing. Averages hide it. The gap is the thing. We keep asking whether rents are going up; the better question is going up for whom.
[It’s worth noting that Ronan Lyons, who writes the Daft report, attributes the record jump in early 2026 to one-off rent resets – where a tenancy ends and a landlord may bring the rent to market level under the new rent control system. On his reading that is a one-time correction rather than a recurring increase, and it is largely complete in Dublin and the other cities while still working through the rest of Leinster, which recorded the largest quarterly increase of the five regions at 2.9%. Westmeath sits in that region, and on his account it is happening there now. He also cautions that the annual figures will fall sharply in early 2027 when that quarter drops out of the twelve-month window – and that this will be arithmetic rather than evidence that the system has succeeded or failed.]
Two towns, 202 people apart – and one of them is in two provinces
Athlone’s population is 22,869. Mullingar’s is 22,667. But it’s important to note that Athlone’s population crosses the Shannon into County Roscommon. It is a count of people living in the town, not a count of County Westmeath residents.
Which makes Athlone the third cross-boundary town in this series, after Drogheda in Week 5 and Carlow–Graiguecullen in Week 7 – and comfortably the sharpest of the three. Drogheda crosses a county line. Carlow crosses a county line and a regional assembly line. Athlone crosses a county line, a provincial line, and a regional assembly line: Leinster and the Eastern and Midland Regional Assembly on one bank, Connacht and the Northern and Western Regional Assembly on the other. One functioning town, planned and measured on both sides by different authorities inside different regional strategies.
And the rental data splits exactly where the river does. Daft places Westmeath in Leinster and Roscommon in Connacht-Ulster, on separate indices moving at different rates. A two-bed apartment advertised in Westmeath averages €1,492; in Roscommon, €1,634. A double room: €555 in Westmeath, €640 in Roscommon.
Buying: a flat county median hiding a €67,000 town gap
On the transaction record, the median house price in County Westmeath was €321,000 across 2026 to date, down 1.1% on the year, on 618 registered sales (HousePrice.ie’s county page for Westmeath, drawn from the PSRA Residential Property Price Register; captured 19 August 2026). These are achieved prices – what buyers actually paid on the register – as distinct from the asking figures in the Daft.ie/MyHome.ie listings snapshot elsewhere in this article. The two are not interchangeable, and we do not treat them as such.
A county median that fell slightly, in a year when new-tenancy rents rose 11.5%, is worth pausing on by itself.
But the county figure conceals the more useful number. Mullingar’s median is €359,500. Athlone’s is €292,500 – about €67,000 apart (HousePrice.ie / PSRA register, captured 19 August 2026).
The view from the market: not many people are moving
Testing the baseline against someone close to the transactions, Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers (IPAV) member agent Cormac Sheehy MIPAV of Sheehy Meares Real Estate – an independent Irish-owned agency founded in 2019, working Athlone alongside offices in Roscommon, Ballinasloe, Galway and Dublin — set out the shape of his own agency’s market for 2026 to date. Three things in that account speak directly to the rental finding above:
(1.) Who is buying? Predominantly first-time buyers: young couples, average age around 33 or 34, currently living with a parent, who have assembled a deposit and are moving out on their own. On his account, they have not been renting. That is the vast majority of what his office is selling. Second to them are movers trading up, from a three- or four-bed semi-detached into a four-bed detached, typically slightly further out of town. Between them, those two groups account for roughly 65% of his sales.
Hold that first group against the rent figures. A county where the dominant first-time buyer never entered the rental market at all is the buy-side counterpart of a 35.3% gap. The conventional route – rent for a few years, save, buy – is not the route these buyers are taking. They are going from a parent’s spare room to ownership, skipping the rented step entirely.
(2.) Who is selling? A large share of his 2026 sales so far have been landlords leaving the market. He runs a substantial rental book, and his read is that each successive change in legislation leaves landlords less invested in staying. He puts it at roughly 1 in 2 of the conversations he is having with prospective sellers. His first and foremost reason is the change in rental regulation, and specifically a discomfort with letting a property for six years without a clear route back to it. Beyond the landlord exits, he describes the ordinary flow any market carries – probate sales, and people trading up or down.
That is the mechanism behind 44 homes to rent. The stock is not disappearing from the county. It is moving out of the rental market and into the sales market, one landlord at a time – which is also, precisely, the event that ejects a sitting tenant on a 1.7% rent into an open market running 35.3% higher.
(3.) And the group that cannot move at all: Trading down, he says, is the problem. There are very few homes a couple whose children have left can trade into.
Put the three together and the same county appears three times over. First-time buyers who never rented. Sitting tenants who are staying exactly where they are. Downsizers with nothing to move to. Westmeath’s constraint, on this evidence, is not what a home costs. It is whether anyone can move at all.
The finished-house premium, and what it says about vacancy
The second trend Cormac names will interest anyone working on vacancy and refurbishment.
He describes a large gap between what buyers will pay for a well-finished home and what they will pay for one needing work. So, two semi-detached houses side by side: one finished to a high standard and move-in ready on day one, achieving perhaps €450,000; the one next door needing significant work, achieving perhaps €350,000. The cost of turning the second into the first, on his estimate, might be €30,000 or €40,000.
His explanation is not that buyers do not trust the arithmetic. It is that they do not know who would carry out the work, they are afraid of what it will cost once started, and they will not lose the time. So they pay for certainty.
Two things follow. The first is a methodological point he raises himself, unprompted, and it is a good example of why we ask practitioners rather than only reading the register. His agency’s own median sale price runs at about €375,000 to €380,000, against the county median of €321,000 – roughly €55,000 to €60,000 above it. His account of why is straightforward: his office does not sell many doer-uppers. The stock they handle sits at the better-finished, better-located end. His book differs from the county because the county includes the houses his book does not carry. Those are his agency’s own sales for 2026 to date, not a county-wide statistic, and they are reported here as such – and they are themselves evidence for the spread he describes.
The second is a placemaking point that runs straight into the vacancy question this series has followed since Kilkenny. If the market discount on an unfinished house is two to three times the cost of finishing it, then the binding constraint is not construction cost. It is confidence – about whether the trades can be got, what the final figure will be, and how long it takes. Grants address the money. On this account the money is not what is stopping people at this price point; the buyer already stands to gain considerably more than the works would cost. What is missing is the assurance that the work can be procured, priced and completed. That is a different intervention entirely, and it is not the one the refurbishment schemes are built to deliver.
What complicates the scarcity story
A week that only reports the findings it likes is not worth much, so here are two things that cut across the picture above.
The short-let ratio is the mildest we have recorded. On the same live capture there were 289 homes advertised for sale, 44 to rent long-term, and 258 entire homes listed on Airbnb. That is roughly 6 whole homes offered to visitors for every 1 offered to a long-term renter against 24 to 1 in Carlow in Week 7 and 28 to 1 in Kilkenny in Week 6. On the series’ own like-for-like measure, Westmeath has the narrowest short-let ratio recorded so far. I would be slow, on this evidence, to hang Westmeath’s rental problem on short-lets. The new-versus-existing tenancy gap is doing far more of the work.
The room market looks comparatively loose. A double room in a house in Westmeath advertises at an average of €555 – the lowest of the eleven Leinster counties Daft publishes, against €581 in Kilkenny and €806 in Kildare. Across Leinster outside Dublin, room availability is running about a fifth above its pre-pandemic average, and room rents rose just 0.5% in the quarter, the smallest increase of the five regions.
So in a county with a third-level campus in Athlone, the room market looks relatively slack while the whole-home market shows 44 listings. The honest question, and I do not have the answer: is the room market quietly absorbing demand that forty-four homes cannot meet – and if it is, what does that mean for the households who cannot rent a room, because they are a family?
For anyone reading this from an investment angle, one further figure is worth having with its caveats attached. Advertised gross yields in Westmeath are pulling apart by property type: a three-bed apartment shows 9.2%, a four-bed house 5.9%..
When moving is not an option at all
The Westmeath Examiner reported during our week on women in the county living in tents. The accounts set out some of the complexity people face when they become homeless: the process of getting access to emergency accommodation, the shortage of landlords willing to accept HAP, and the difficulty of securing suitable accommodation at all.
Read that beside the market section. 1 in 2 of an Athlone agent’s seller conversations is a landlord leaving. The county has 44 homes advertised to rent. A tenant displaced from a 1.7% tenancy re-enters a market 35.3% dearer – if they can find a listing, and if the listing will take HAP.
In Athlone itself, the week’s conversations sharpened this further. Some of that time was spent sitting in the sun in the town’s new public realm, which is a section of its own below. But after nine weeks on the road I also had ordinary jobs to do – the Eir shop, the post office, ‘school shoes’ in Clarks (for me, my daughter is decades past this August ritual!) – and the people I met standing in those queues were a different sample entirely from the ones enjoying a bench in the sunshine. The conversations were noticeably different for it: a lot of stressed parents, in the last week before school. And the concern that came up most often was social housing waiting lists, and how long it takes to be housed.
The recurring services question, and a finding I did not expect
Two threads from the ground week are worth putting on the record…
- The first is the one Louth raised in Week 5 and Carlow raised in Week 7: whether the services arrive with or in advance of the estates. In Rochfortbridge, families faced school transport shortages and capacity pressure going into the 2026/27 year. The pilot bus scheme was renewed at previous capacity levels, but demand meant parents logging in were still meeting “no seat available”, leaving students bound for St Joseph’s Secondary School without guaranteed transport. St Joseph’s is slated for a major extension and refurbishment towards a long-term projected enrolment of 1,000 pupils with a new special education needs base – but the interim gap is what a family lives with this September. In the same period a 41-house scheme in the area was refused amid concern about how local services would carry the expansion.
- The second is a finding I did not go looking for. Of 23 people I spoke to at random across the county, four had their accommodation found or provided by their employer – across construction, sport and hospitality, and originating from Northern Ireland, Limerick, Tipperary and South America. Admittedly, that is an informal count from an unstructured week, not a survey, but four in 23 is high enough to be worth naming, and it echoes what Ger Fahey said in Tipperary in Week 2: the shortage is self-reinforcing when the workers needed to build have nowhere to live. What Westmeath adds is the workaround. Where the rental market cannot house incoming workers, employers are stepping in and housing them directly. That is a real adaptation, and it is also a signal – because it means an entire cohort of arrivals is invisible to both the rental market and the rent index.
Athlone’s public realm: the instrument that did reach the ground
Every county week in this series asks the same placemaking question – whether policy intentions actually reach the ground to impact lived experiences. Rochfortbridge is one answer. Sean Costello Street is the other, and it is the more encouraging one.
*Full disclosure, I was honoured to serve as a judge at the Irish Planning Institute’s 2025 Planning Awards, at which the Athlone Town Centre Enhancement Project was Highly Commended in the Urban Regeneration – State Led category. I am therefore not entirely objective, however, this week I sat, spent time, and chatted to people enjoying this space in the August sunshine so I can now commend it as a user also!
The record first. The project was entered by Westmeath County Council in the State-led urban regeneration category and highly commended at the 2025 Irish Planning Awards, presented at Clontarf Castle Hotel on 25 September 2025; the scheme itself had opened the previous November. It was one of five entries highly commended from a record 80 received, in a category won by Tipperary County Council and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage for the Kickham Barracks regeneration in Clonmel– a scheme visited and enjoyed in Week 2. The Athlone project was led by Westmeath County Council with support from the Urban Regeneration and Development Fund and delivered with a specialist multi-disciplinary team, McAdam Design and John Cradock Ltd, across roughly 0.6 hectares of the town core.
- 90m of Sean Costello Street – the old Dublin Road – fully pedestrianised
- Mardyke Street realigned and footpaths upgraded into a high-quality shared surface, stitching the traditional street network to the two large retail centres, Athlone Town Centre and Golden Island
- Priority signalised junctions with improved pedestrian facilities at Mardyke Street, Gleeson Street, Pump Lane and St Mary’s Square
- Soft landscaping, new trees, and seating designed as rest spots rather than as street furniture, with incidental play worked into the design – children’s play built into a street people are already walking down, rather than fenced off into a separate facility
And the detail that speaks directly to the thread this series has followed since Kilkenny: the public realm work acted as the catalyst for unlocking and remediating prominent gateway sites, including the former O’Neill’s pub site. That is the sequence the dereliction argument in Week 6 kept reaching for – not a levy or a grant acting alone on a single building, but a change to the street that alters what the derelict building beside it is worth doing something with. The framework has since been taken up by the Office of the Planning Regulator as a national case study, featured in OPR training material on how local authorities can lift footfall, improve universal accessibility and support local business through design.
Sitting in it, the thing that struck me is the same thing that struck me about the regenerated riverside in New Ross in Week 4. It isn’t treating it as a tourist attraction. People were using it – on their way somewhere, or on a break, or because a bench in the sun on a Tuesday is a reasonable thing to want. That is the hardest test a public realm scheme faces and – in my opinion – the only one that counts.
And one confession. I did not get to Sean’s Bar this week, and I was sorry about it (but I HAVE enjoyed a few long afternoons there in the past!). The pub on Main Street in Athlone, a few steps from the castle and the Shannon quay, is Ireland’s oldest and dates its trade to around 900 AD – over eleven hundred years on the one site.
The last 9 weeks of this series have been spent counting empty units, long-term vacancy cores and buildings nobody will take on. A single premises trading continuously on the same ground for eleven centuries is the exact opposite of that problem, and there are not many towns in Europe that can point at one. It sits about 90 metres from a street that was pedestrianised last year – which is as neat a summary of what Athlone is working with as I could write.
Notes from Mullingar, Castlepollard and a rugby club car park
Set aside the traffic for a moment – and it is demonstrably the worst in the county – because Mullingar was one of the most genuinely buzzing places we have been in 9 weeks. The variety of the retail offer is matched only by the variety of the eateries, and on a sunny week the footfall was heavy, the public realm was working, and the outdoor dining was full. Flowers and hanging plants throughout, with a particular hat tip to the Greville Hotel. There are small placemaking surprises if you walk it, like the mural on Meeting House Lane – the same low-cost, high-return intervention Trevor Connolly described in Drogheda in Week 5, doing the same job in a laneway here.
The best coffee in the county was at Try Line Coffee, newly under new management, in the grounds of Shay Murtagh Park at Mullingar Rugby Football Club – which is its own quiet placemaking point about what a sports club’s grounds can be during the week.
The takeaways for Westmeath
Three things stand out from our travels in Week 9:
(1.) First, the gap between staying and moving is a real concern, and it is a national pattern that Westmeath shows unusually clearly. A 35.3% difference between new and existing tenancies, driven by 11.5% against 1.7%, independently corroborated in shape by an entirely separate commercial series showing 2.1% against 7.7% nationally and 22% against 78% since 2016.
(2.) Second, the market view says the same thing from four directions at once. First-time buyers arriving from a parent’s home rather than a rental. Sitting tenants staying put. Downsizers with nothing to trade into. Landlords exiting in 1 of every 21 seller conversations – the single event most likely to push a sitting tenant into the open market. Add the Westmeath Examiner‘s reporting of women living in tents and the shortage of landlords accepting HAP, and the sequence completes itself.
(3.) Third, the short-let explanation does not fit here. Six entire homes on Airbnb for every long-term rental is the narrowest ratio in the series, against 24 to 1 in Carlow and 28 to 1 in Kilkenny. The room market, meanwhile, looks comparatively loose. Neither of those makes the rental problem smaller – 44 listings is 44 listings – but both mean the usual explanation is not the operative one in Westmeath. The operative one is that the door between one tenancy and the next has become very expensive to walk through.
(4.) A fourth thing is worth saying, because this series has spent 9 weeks asking whether the national policy reaches the ground and it would be unhelpful only to report the times they do not. In Athlone they did. A pedestrianised 90 metres, a realigned street, priority junctions, trees and benches and incidental play, funded through the Urban Regeneration and Development Fund and now used by the Office of the Planning Regulator as a national case study – and, in the detail that matters most for this series, acting as the catalyst that unlocked a derelict gateway site rather than waiting for a levy to do it.
(5.) And running under all of it, the finished-house premium: a €100,000 price gap for €30,000 to €40,000 of work says the barrier to bringing stock back to standard is not money but confidence – in trades, in cost certainty, in time. That is a different problem from the one the grants were designed for, and it is the one I would most like to see tested in another county.
As ever, this is a starting point, not a verdict, and we are far more interested in people’s lived experience than in the data. If you live, work, build, buy, sell or rent in Westmeath – in Athlone, Mullingar, Moate, Kilbeggan, Castlepollard – and the figures do not match what you see, please get in touch: carol@placeengage.com