Week 2: Tipperary – placemaking in every town
iProperty Radio presents Place Engage, a non-political placemaking series across 26 counties throughout the 26 weeks of Ireland’s EU Council Presidency
- Median asking Price €240,000
- Rent for new tenancies €1,141pm – 4th lowest in the State
- 17% of all new homes are one-off builds
- Number of vacant homes across the county is down 15% of the last decade
- Population at work has increased 15% Home ownership is 69%, above the national average of 66%
- Youngest farm holders in the state and second largest dairy herd
- Lowest bus commuting rate in the state at 1%
Is County Tipperary the greenest county in Ireland? It could hardly have looked better this week in the sun, with trees shading every road and mountain glimpses in between.
The presentation of the towns and villages we passed through was excellent – well done to the community in Bansha, the village is a haven – while larger towns like Clonmel were buzzing with energy and people.
At the start of the Suir Blueway at Cahir Castle, the memorials and community amenities – including a ‘Feed the Ducks’ station – stopped us in our tracks. We spent a whole afternoon exploring Cahir town, its sculpture park and memorial. While we didn’t walk the entire Suir Blueway this week, we have already made glamping plans to return (without the ageing canines).
Placemaking, county-wide
What sets Tipperary apart this week is not one flagship project but the sheer spread of them. Tipperary County Council is driving public realm schemes across the county to enhance town centres, support local communities and grow the tourism offer – and, critically, has been consistently successful in accessing the national and EU funding streams that make such work possible, including the Urban Regeneration and Development Fund and Fáilte Ireland’s tourism product development funding. That success reflects well on both the local authority and the communities whose engagement underpins every one of these schemes.
The pattern repeats from town to town: high-quality paving, landscaping, upgraded public lighting, new street furniture, and pedestrian-friendly traffic changes – but each scheme is shaped to its own place.
While water infrastructure and energy were part of every housing delivery conversation (mixed emotions across the communities about renewables), it’s difficult not to notice the billboards from National Broadband Ireland announcing the completion of NBI’s high-speed fibre network.
- Clonmel: The Kickham Barracks public realm development – a testament to the local authority and local community alike – sits alongside wider urban design work widening footpaths, adding pedestrian crossings and recasting traffic management in the town centre.
- Cahir: The Sculpture Park, so many dementia-aware town square enhancements, new paving and brightly painted street furniture across Castle Street, St Mary’s Road and Church Street.
- Cashel: Public realm refurbishment across Main Street, Maher’s Lane and John Street, including interpretative murals, a new bus shelter and wayfinding signage.
- Thurles: A major public realm contract has transformed Liberty Square with significant surface enhancements and pedestrian amenities.
- Roscrea: An Age-Friendly public realm scheme is planned for Gantly Road and Gantly Street, with overhead cables to be undergrounded and parking and pedestrian areas redesigned – a reminder that placemaking is also about who a street works for.
It’s important to point out that while I tend view placemaking through the lens of New European Bauhaus, mainly THRIVE projects in regional Ireland (https://caroltallon.com/the-role-of-the-new-european-bauhaus-in-building-homes-and-sustainable-communities/), the LEADER Programme 2023–27 (EU co-funded under the CAP Strategic Plan) operates across County Tipperary, delivered through the North and South Tipperary Development Companies alongside Tipperary County Council and the LCDC, funding community facilities, amenity, tourism and environmental projects.
Placemaking at this scale is never accidental. It takes a local authority with the capacity to prepare competitive funding applications, and communities willing to show up for consultations and stand behind the schemes. Tipperary, on this week’s evidence, has both.
Notes from Tipperary
That sense of community isn’t new here – I learned it the hard way, long before this series. I got to know County Tipperary well in the early 2000s as I commuted between Carlow and Kerry weekly, long before the motorway, when the Kilkenny to Clonmel stretch was a harrowing drive. I remember a gentle tip (a car crash at about 5km/h!) when I rear-ended a lovely father and his adult son as we inched along the road to Doon during traffic works. I was utterly unreasonable and defensive getting out of the car – and he responded by taking out his shoelace and tying up my front bumper. I think of his reasonableness and kindness (and my own unacceptable behaviour) every time I drive this road. Sometimes received kindness is difficult to receive, but it stays with you for decades.
Places are made by so many acts and actions, but they’re held together by people like that man on the road to Doon. Twenty-odd years on, everything we saw this week suggests Tipperary still runs on the same generosity.
A castle with screen credits
Cahir Castle is an authentic medieval fortress that regularly doubles as a film set of international standing. Stanley Kubrick filmed scenes for Barry Lyndon (1975) here; it served as Camelot in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and again in The Green Knight (2021), for which it won the EUFCN Best European Filming Location award; and its courtyards were dressed as a 14th-century French château for Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021). For a rural town, that is placemaking currency few can match.
The Tipperary baseline
As with every county in this series, the full data baseline is published separately in this week’s infographic, drawn from our master research database with every figure sourced and dated. This week’s tiles cover the housing market (asking prices and new-tenancy rents), one-off housing as a share of new-home starts, vacancy trends over the decade, employment and home ownership, farming demographics, and commuting patterns – where Tipperary records the lowest bus commuting rate in the State.
One gap in the public record remains worth restating: planning refusal rates were routinely published per local authority until around 2011 and no longer are. If you can point us to a current source, we’d welcome it.
Community Voices
Friday belonged to the people who make Tipperary work: local retailers and tourism providers, the teams behind the counters of the county’s coffee shops (the coffee at the Hub in Clonmel deserves its own mention), and third-generation auctioneer and IPAV member Pat Quirke of PF Quirke & Co. in Clonmel, where the fourth generation, his daughter Natasha, is already part of the team.
And in Cahir, Ger Fahey of Remagin Ireland (Remagin by Etex) gave us the conversation of the week: an offsite construction facility manufacturing a solution to the housing shortage that cannot scale up because the housing shortage means additional workers have nowhere to live. His record of houses delivered from ground-breaking to key handover in twelve weeks, and multi-storey healthcare accommodation delivered in weeks during COVID, gives his call to treat housing as an emergency an authority that no projection could. The full conversation is in Friday’s Community Voices piece: Watch in full – https://youtu.be/k3w5S2BhBN0?si=uASb23LtaTlkdlTa
While we’re only wrapping week 2 of this 26-county, 26-week series, it feels like Tipperary will surely be a frontrunner for best placemaking initiatives, with exciting public realm projects in every town and village we visited.
Next stop… Donegal!
As with every county in this series, we welcome corrections, additions and local knowledge: carol@placeengage.com
Photography: Katie Tallon MPRII
