🇪🇺 Week 6: Placemaking across County Kilkenny
Week 6 of Place Engage’s 26-week, 26-county non-political placemaking tour for the duration of Ireland’s EU Council Presidency takes us to County Kilkenny.
104,160 people · average age 39.7 · over-65s up 21% · median house price €345,000 (~10% below national) · new-tenancy rent €1,303 (~26% below national) · 172 completions last quarter, 3 of them apartments · residential vacancy 3.2% · 454 entire homes on Airbnb against 16 to rent long-term.
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 and exploring where the published record tracks lived experience, and where it diverges. Week 6 took us to County Kilkenny — a county I know well and have worked in at early points in my career — talking about the market and the broader placemaking picture for Carlow and Kilkenny with Brian Redmond and the KCLR Daily team, testing the baseline with Lorraine Moloney of DNG Ella Dunphy in the city, and finding, entirely by accident, one of the more remarkable pieces of placemaking I have come across all year on a back road near Cuffesgrange. What surfaced were threads about the short-let squeeze in a heritage city, a building pattern that is almost all houses and no apartments, the gap between dereliction policy and dereliction action, and the quieter question of what it is actually like to live and work in a compact regional city.
You can listen back to the full KCLR conversation with Brian Redmond on KCLR FM: https://player.autopod.xyz/1414297
A personal note before the data
Kilkenny is a county I know on a day-to-day basis, and my connection with it is not only professional. I worked in Kilkenny city in the early stages of my career, as a young mother, and — to be honest — I found the city difficult to work in at that time. The daily routine of getting from one side of the city to the other for a creche drop-off, back in for work, city centre parking, across the city again for pick-up, and then out through traffic for home, was a real strain. In fairness, that is more than a quarter of a century ago now; the city has since gained a ring road. But traffic and parking remain a genuine pain point, and I have always found the city easier to enjoy as a visitor than to move around in for work.
Back in the early 2000s I also lived in Waterford city, and found it a more liveable place at that time. Today I can set both against Galway city, which I would call a genuinely liveable city — with housing availability and traffic the only real frictions. I am conscious, though, that I no longer have to navigate childcare and school drop-offs inside a tight business-hours schedule, so I would be genuinely interested to hear from working parents with young children about the experience of our regional cities today. That is exactly the kind of lived detail no rent index or completions figure will ever capture, and it is the reason we spend the week on the ground rather than in the spreadsheet.
The headline: the short-let squeeze
The single figure a Kilkenny resident will recognise from their own search history is the balance between what is offered to visitors and what is available to live in. On 1 August 2026 there were 454 entire homes listed on Airbnb across the county, and just 16 available to rent long-term, with a further 244 advertised for sale (Airbnb and Daft.ie, a live same-day capture). That is roughly 28 whole homes offered to a visitor for every one a resident can rent.
It is a live platform snapshot rather than a perfect like-for-like — the two platforms are not directly comparable, and the ratio will move week to week — but the direction is unmistakable, and it is sharper here than in most counties we have visited so far. In a heritage city, the same demand that fills the festivals is competing directly for the homes people actually live in. Whether that reads as a tourism economy working or as a housing problem for residents is genuinely both at once, and holding both sides of it is what this week was for.
We build houses here — almost no apartments
County Kilkenny completed 172 new homes in the latest quarter: 57 one-off houses, 112 estate houses, and just three apartments (CSO New Dwelling Completions, Q2 2026). For a city carrying real rental and visitor demand, an output that is roughly two-thirds scheme housing and effectively zero apartments is worth sitting with — it is a question about the mix, not simply the number. The forward pipeline is steady rather than spectacular: 589 residential buildings were under construction in June 2026, and 590 new residential address points were added over the preceding twelve months (GeoDirectory, Q2 2026).
Affordable on paper, tight in reality
The county median house price was €345,000 for 2026 to date — flat year on year, and about 10% below the national median of €385,000 (HousePrice.ie, drawn from the PSRA Residential Property Price Register). New-tenancy rents averaged €1,303, around a quarter below the national figure of €1,755 (RTB/ESRI Rent Index, Q4 2025). And yet residential vacancy stood at only 3.2% in June 2026, below the national 3.7% (GeoDirectory). So the county reads as affordable, but the market is tight and there is very little slack in it — a flat median at a time of continued national price growth is itself a signal worth putting to local agents.
A low-density, ageing, one-city county
Kilkenny is home to 104,160 people, growing steadily — up 5% since 2016 — across 2,073 km², which works out at roughly 50 people per km²: genuinely rural (CSO Census 2022). The average age is 39.7, older than the national figure, and the over-65s are up 21% in six years, to just over 17,000 people. The whole county orbits one compact heritage city of some 27,000 residents. That shape means walkability, services, and homes suited to downsizing matter more here than raw building numbers do — and it is the backdrop against which my own memory of the school-run city should probably be read.
The view from the market
Testing the baseline against someone close to the transactions, Lorraine Moloney, Rental Manager and Valuer with DNG Ella Dunphy in the city, describes a sales market that has stayed strong through the year, with demand continuing to exceed the supply of good-quality homes. Demand is strongest for three- and four-bed houses, bungalows, and properties in walk-in condition, particularly in Kilkenny city and the main commuter towns. Prices are still rising, though at a more moderate rate than in recent years, and the market is led by first-time buyers and by local families trading up and down rather than by investors.
Investor activity, on her account, has declined under higher costs, taxation and regulation — and this is where her observation tests the baseline most directly. Some landlords are now choosing to sell, which adds to sales stock but places further pressure on an already thin rental market: the human mechanism behind that 454-to-16 short-let figure. Overall, she reads Kilkenny as a seller’s market, but one in which accurate valuation, realistic pricing, presentation, and having the legal paperwork ready matter more than ever.
Dereliction: the problem isn’t policy, it’s activation
If there was one policy argument I kept returning to on air, it is this: the gap in Ireland’s county towns is not a lack of instruments, it is a lack of follow-through. We already have the tools — a derelict sites levy, refurbishment grants, town-centre policy, and CPO powers. The gap is that only around 2,100 properties sit on local authority derelict registers nationally, while the Government’s own working estimate for the incoming derelict property tax runs to as many as 19,000. That distance between what is registered and what is actually derelict is precisely where county towns lose out, and it makes the honest question one of enforcement and capacity rather than of new announcements.
Four things would make the existing tools bite.
- The first is to make the penalty real and make sure the new tax lands: the Derelict Sites Act levy of 7% of market value has been collected unevenly by councils, with arrears piling up, and from Budget 2026 it is being replaced by a Derelict Property Tax of no less than 7%, moved to Revenue as a self-assessed tax with standard enforcement, penalties and interest, and a preliminary national register due in 2027. The test is whether that register is accurate down to town level and whether moving it to Revenue actually changes owner behaviour rather than just changing who sends the letter.
2. The second is to make the carrot easier to reach. The Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant under Croí Cónaithe Towns offers up to €50,000 for a vacant home and €70,000 for a derelict one, but for county-town applicants the catch is cash flow: it is largely paid on completion, so people have to fund the works first, and real refurbishment costs often outrun the grant. Bridging finance or staged payments, faster processing, and keeping the grant aligned with build-cost inflation would all help.
3. The third is to give councils the capacity to act where owners will not. Compulsory purchase for activation exists, but using it at scale needs vacant-homes officers, legal capacity, and money to acquire, refurbish and re-sell or re-let — and one or two visible wins on a main street changes the psychology of a whole town.
4. The fourth is to join dereliction up with living in the town centre, which is where Town Centre First matters: a great deal of county-town dereliction is upper floors above shops, and cutting the practical barriers to “living over the shop” — change-of-use, fire and access rules, and the cost of conversion — is what turns a repainted façade into actual homes. Kilkenny is one of the designated Living City Initiative areas for refurbishment tax relief, though the qualifying streets are specific and worth confirming before leaning on that too hard.
Underneath all four is a fifth point that makes the others testable: measure it publicly, town by town. Publishing register numbers, levies and tax collected, grants drawn down, and units brought back into use at town level is what would let Callan, Thomastown, Castlecomer and Graiguenamanagh see whether the policy is reaching them, and not just the national aggregate. None of this is about any one government; the instruments have cross-party origins and the challenge is the same for every county. The point of Place Engage is to test whether these national tools are reaching the ground — and on Kilkenny’s evidence, the policy exists; the missing piece is consistent enforcement, accessible funding, and the local capacity to follow through.
Stumbling Upon the Spirit of Place (literally!)
The week’s quieter lesson came down a diverted back road. En route from Paulstown to Callan, an RTA road closure sent me down a country road I had never driven — through the townland of Burnchurch, worth a day’s exploration in itself — and past what I first took for a stone bus shelter, until the glass panels made me reverse and pull in.
I had never even heard of the James Hoban memorial at Desart, Cuffesgrange: an open-air arbour marking the birthplace of the Kilkenny craftsman who went on to design the White House. Stone walls, white Carrara marble standing in for the White House stone, and frosted glass carrying words of place and belonging in both Irish and English, throwing a shadow across the grass as the light filters through. The fitting part, for an offline tour spending 26 weeks on the road chatting to people about the essence of place, is that it was built by a programme literally called Spirit of Place: unveiled on 7 August 2008 to mark 250 years since Hoban’s birth, designed by the architect Travis Price and raised in little over a week by students from the Catholic University of America’s Spirit of Place / Spirit of Design programme, alongside local volunteers, with Kilkenny County Council preparing the site.
Two things stay with me as a placemaker. First, it marks a genuinely global story — a line of sight from a Kilkenny estate to Pennsylvania Avenue — at the exact rural spot where it began. Second, I only found it because a diversion rerouted me: a piece of cultural heritage this good sits unsignposted on a back road, its grass triangle overgrown, which goes straight to the question of community buy-in and community ownership. The making was excellent. The keeping — wayfinding, maintenance, the small budget that keeps a rural monument legible — is the part of placemaking that can fall off a cliff once the original funding dries up, if there is not genuine community ownership behind it. I have consistently found harnessing, building and maintaining community capacity to be the weakest part of Ireland’s placemaking puzzle, despite a wealth of local knowledge and willingness. If placemaking is about the spirit of a place, this one is a reminder that the spirit still needs a community that cares enough to cut the grass and keep the path in.
*The full account of that find is here: https://placeengage.com/📍accidentially-finding-the-spirit-of-place-on-our-placemaking-exploration-of-county-kilkenny/
Heritage, on foot and on the record
Kilkenny wears its heritage more visibly than most, and two developments this week sat neatly alongside the Hoban find. The Kilkenny Railway Heritage Society, established in 2025, launched its Railway Heritage Trail No 1 at MacDonagh Junction — the kind of low-cost, volunteer-led wayfinding that turns everyday infrastructure into a story people can walk. And a new Kilkenny Heritage Strategy was launched, described in local coverage as thoughtful and forward-looking; the real test of any such strategy, on the evidence of the Hoban arbour, will be in the keeping rather than the making.
For anyone wanting to understand how deep that heritage runs, I would point to a locally written gem I picked up second-hand: Pat Dargan’s Kilkenny: City of Heritage (2019), which guides the reader through 45 buildings and structures — from the Round Tower and St Canice’s Cathedral to Georgian townhouses, Victorian shopfronts and twentieth-century civic architecture. What I value in it is that it deliberately combines nationally important monuments with everyday commercial premises and domestic buildings, on the understanding that a city’s identity is shaped as much by its streets, shopfronts and homes as by its castles and cathedrals. That is placemaking’s founding instinct — that the ordinary carries a place as much as the exceptional — set out one building at a time.
There was a harder heritage-of-place lesson this week too. On the evening of 3 August, a heavy rain outburst overwhelmed the surface-water drainage system on Bridge Street in Callan, pushing dirty surface water up through gullies and a manhole onto the street. Kilkenny County Council was clear that this was surface water only, unrelated to the Kings River or to the wastewater system, and that silt washed through after a long dry spell explained the discolouration; it arranged for the affected streets to be cleaned the following morning. Its own statement made the placemaking point plainly: such flash floods are becoming more frequent under changing weather patterns, and are difficult to mitigate. For county towns, climate resilience is quietly becoming part of the placemaking brief, not a separate one.
Key Points for Kilkenny
Three things stand out from the Week 6 file.
- First, this is a low-density, ageing, steadily growing county organised around one compact heritage city — a very different shape from the dense, twin-town counties of the east, and a place where walkability, services and downsizing-suitable housing will matter more than raw pipeline.
- Second, the county reads as relatively affordable on paper — median prices about 10% below the national line, new-tenancy rents about a quarter below it — yet builds almost exclusively houses, with effectively no apartments in the latest quarter and vacancy already below the national rate. The market view sharpens exactly that tension: Lorraine Moloney’s landlords selling into a seller’s market is the mechanism turning thin rental stock thinner.
- Third, the sharpest single figure in the file is the short-let squeeze — 454 entire homes on Airbnb against 16 for long-term rent on the same August day — and the honest response to it is not a new instrument but the activation of the ones we already have: an accurate derelict register, a tax that is actually collected, grants people can afford to use, and councils resourced to step in when owners will not. Or, as I put it on air: we don’t need more dereliction policies — we need the ones we have to bite.
As ever, this is a starting point, not a verdict. Kilkenny is a county I know well, which is exactly why I want to test my own assumptions against what residents and practitioners see day to day — in the city, and in Callan, Thomastown, Castlecomer, Graiguenamanagh and the rural south. Does the data match what you see? Corrections and contributions are always welcome: carol@placeengage.com
With huge thanks to Brian Redmond and the KCLR Daily team for the opportunity to discuss the housing market and the broader placemaking picture for Carlow and Kilkenny — listen back on KCLR FM: https://player.autopod.xyz/1414297
