Week 3: Donegal – A Tale of Two Property Markets, and the Places Between Them
iProperty Radio presents Place Engage, a non-political placemaking series across 26 counties throughout the 26 weeks of Ireland’s EU Council Presidency.
Week 3 brought Place Engage to Donegal, and Donegal did what Donegal does: it refused to fit the national narrative. This is the county with the lowest price levels in the State and some of the fastest momentum; a county growing at a pace not seen in generations, with a stubborn overhang of vacancy and dereliction; a county where the housing conversation is shaped less by planning permission than by mortgages, construction costs and the long shadow of defective concrete blocks. The numbers tell one story two ways – and the full set, sourced and dated, is in this week’s Placemaking Data Baseline infographic rather than repeated here.
The listening tour
As with every county week, the aim was not to arrive with conclusions but to gather them – from tenants, business owners, would-be homebuyers, and everyone who served us food, coffee, ice-creams and dog bowls along the way. The week began in Glenties and moved through Fintown, Ballybofey, Raphoe country, Letterkenny, and up the coast towards Dunfanaghy.
The Placemaking Data Baseline: how the series works
Every Place Engage county week rests on the same foundation: the Placemaking Data Baseline, compiled and verified before we ever cross the county boundary. It is deliberately broader than a property-market snapshot – it reaches past prices, planning data, employment and average wages into the wider measures that shape how a place actually functions: availability, vacancy and dereliction, remediation delivery, population change, language and community.
The baseline is the starting point, not the conclusion. The time on the ground is spent listening – testing how the data tracks with lived experience, and watching how people’s perceptions of their own place sit alongside the published numbers. Sometimes the two align; often the gap between them is the story. In Donegal this week, that gap – between a county with the lowest price levels in the State and residents for whom homeownership feels out of reach – was exactly where the most valuable conversations happened.
Thanks to Highland Radio
A particular thank-you this week to the news team at Highland Radio, who picked up the Donegal Placemaking Data Baseline as the week got underway – including the county’s new home completions almost doubling year-on-year in the first quarter of this year – and, more importantly, used the platform to invite the people of Donegal to get involved and have their say on the future of their communities. Local media taking local placemaking seriously is itself a placemaking act, and it made a real difference to the conversations that followed across the county.
What we heard, again and again, was a distinction locals draw instinctively and outsiders miss: the difference between the local and the central. Rural planning came up in almost every conversation, but rarely as a grievance against the county’s planners. A young woman from Raphoe, met at a converted-horsebox coffee stop in Fintown, put it plainly: among her friends who had gone through the process, planning wasn’t the biggest issue – mortgages and rising construction costs were. That surprised us, and then it kept being repeated. There was a strong sense that planners were seen as working for and with the local community. Where frustration surfaced, it attached to the distance between Donegal and decision-making elsewhere: “they didn’t really listen to us” and “they don’t really get it” were phrases we heard more than once. For a listening project, that is itself a finding – about where people feel heard, and where they don’t.
Pride of place, everywhere you look
Donegal in a July heatwave is a masterclass in what placemaking looks like when it works. Social life had moved entirely outdoors: packed beaches, full hills and valleys, live music in the evening air. Glenties set the bar on day one — a nostalgic photo montage on the exterior walls of the market hall, a fire station festooned with “Pet Patrol” signage and hanging baskets (which will be in trouble if the hosepipe ban makes it that far north), heritage buildings restored or on the way to restoration, including the Brian Friel Centre. None of this is accidental. It is the accumulation of local decisions, local care, and local pride — the fabric between the buildings as much as the buildings themselves.
The county’s settlement pattern tells its own placemaking story. Through the Gaeltacht, housing gathers in clusters; further into the hills, homes stand more remote, where huge tractors dwarfed the bungalows they were parked outside. And then, around Letterkenny and up into Dunfanaghy, a newer Donegal: recently built homes on a scale closer to small hotels than to the bungalows of the previous generation. Same county, three distinct built responses to landscape, livelihood and era — a two-speed market visible from the roadside before you ever open a spreadsheet.
The market, from the ground
Huge thanks to Boyd Robinson of Robinson Estate Agents in Letterkenny and Dunfanaghy, this week’s IPAV contributor, who set out the forces underpinning the Donegal market: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1F21EEwTJ1/?mibextid=KsPBc6&startTimeMs=2000
- A tale of two markets: Demand and pricing behave very differently across the county – the coastal and lifestyle-led market and the functional local market are moving to different rhythms.
- Remote workers and changing buyer profiles: The profile of who is buying in Donegal, and why, has shifted – with remote and hybrid working reshaping where demand lands.
- Mica and escalating construction costs: The defective concrete block legacy and the cost of building remain defining forces on both supply and buyer confidence.
- Development land: A further update on development land to follow.
Renting in Letterkenny
If the sales market tells two stories, the rental market tells one, starkly. Availability across the county, captured on a single day this week, was measured in the low dozens – against hundreds of homes for sale and over a thousand active short-term lets counted in just two of the county’s municipal districts. The full availability snapshot is in the baseline infographic.
In Letterkenny, most of the people we met were renting. One woman, originally from Estonia and met while walking her dog, described years of navigating a market where pet-friendly private tenancies are scarce and where she deliberately avoided certain newer schemes because of long-running antisocial behaviour issues she said had worsened in recent years. Asked whether buying a home locally was an ambition, her response was genuine confusion that the question could even be asked. In a county with the lowest median house price in the State, that answer is worth sitting with.
Notes from Donegal
Nearly three decades ago, as a young single-parent legal graduate looking for an apprenticeship – in the days before traineeships, minimum wage, and Google – I worked through the Golden Pages phoning law firms in places that would be cheaper than Dublin to live, work, raise my daughter and keep studying, but rural and coastal enough to leave room for a life. Two interviews came: one in Ballybofey, one in Tralee. I travelled to both with a months-old baby in the car seat behind me. Tralee called first, and down we moved. Had Donegal called first, that is where my career would have started – and nearly thirty years on, I know I would have been happy either way. The two counties sit at opposite ends of the country, but the similarities are striking: the landscape, and more importantly, the friendliness and openness of the people.
This week, driving roads I might once have called home, that near-miss kept surfacing. At Yer Man’s Coffee Cove in Meentymorgal – a converted horsebox with particularly great coffee and the best chocolate chip shortbread I have ever tasted – there was a serious in-car debate about whether to abandon the planned route entirely and double back just to stock up for the journey home. The route won, narrowly. The shortbread remains a matter of record!
And a word for the Highlands Hotel in Glenties, whose wonderfully dog-friendly welcome set the tone for the week – and for McCafferty’s, where the first day ended at 7.30pm with a well-deserved glass of wine and great live music outdoors. Successful placemaking shows up not just in buildings, but between buildings, and wherever communities gather.
Remediation, delivery and the road ahead
No account of housing in Donegal can leave out defective concrete blocks. This series is non-political by design, and the constructive lens here is delivery: remediation approvals and payments in the county continue to build, and Donegal County Council publishes a monthly activity report tracking progress. The scale of the challenge and the pace of the response – both are in the baseline, sourced and dated. Alongside it sits the counter-story to the county’s record growth: residential vacancy and dereliction rates far above the national picture, and a targeted vacancy and dereliction programme now underway in Ballybofey and Stranorlar town centres, signposting owners towards refurbishment and repair-and-lease supports. A county growing at a record pace with a significant share of its homes vacant is exactly the placemaking tension this series exists to explore.
The Gaeltacht, the language, and the Presidency
Donegal is home to one of the strongest Gaeltacht communities in the State, and Census data on Irish language use here leads the country on several measures. With Irish a full official language of the European Union, and this series running through Ireland’s EU Council Presidency, the language figures in this week’s baseline are not a local footnote – they are part of the European story of place.
Each week, for each county, Place Engage presents the numbers so that communities, practitioners and policymakers can have the real conversation about place, that really impact people on the ground.
Corrections, additions and local knowledge always welcome: carol@placeengage.com
📷 Katie Tallon MPRII