Week 4: Wexford – One County, Several Markets, Happy Residents (in a heatwave!)
iProperty Radio presents Place Engage, a non-political placemaking series across 26 counties throughout the 26 weeks of Ireland’s EU Council Presidency.
Week 4 brought Place Engage to Wexford, and Wexford spent the week gently refusing to be described as one place. Ask about the housing market and you will be asked which market you mean. Ask about vacancy and you will get two answers, sometimes three, depending on which town you are standing in. This is a county performing strongly on several national measures — and carrying, inside those county-level figures, differences between its towns that the county average completely conceals. The full data set, sourced and dated, is in this week’s Placemaking Data Baseline infographic rather than repeated here.
It was also, for the fourth county week running, sunny — though in Ireland’s sunny south east we expected nothing less.
The listening tour
The week ran from Gorey and Enniscorthy down to Wexford town and out to New Ross, with a good few villages in between. As in every county week, the aim was not to arrive with conclusions but to collect them: from residents, tenants, business owners, would-be buyers, and the people who served us coffee, lunch and dog bowls along the way. We filled out post-its as we went, town by town, and the pattern that emerged was less about the county than about the distance between its parts.
Gorey
Gorey was described, consistently and without prompting, as its own market. Not the north of the county — its own market, operating almost independently of everywhere else in Wexford on house prices and on commercial vacancy both. That is a striking thing to hear repeated by people with no particular reason to be comparing notes.
Residents are, on the whole, very happy with the town. Two caveats came up often enough to record. The first is parking. The second is more interesting: several people described the hustle and bustle as having tipped over into almost too much. That is an unusual complaint to hear in a provincial Irish town, and worth noting as a placemaking signal in its own right — success brings its own pressures, and they arrive before the infrastructure does.
Enniscorthy
Enniscorthy is looking well. People are happy with their town and proud of it, and the word that came up more than once, unprompted, was safe. It is not a word that appears in any dataset, and it is one of the more valuable things a town can have said about it.
Two concerns were raised repeatedly. The first is business turnover: a perception that new businesses do not last beyond two or three years. The second is the retail offering, described as noticeably lacking in diversity, with clothing shops and a higher-end offer both specifically called for. The two concerns are probably related, and both belong to the category of things a town can act on.
Wexford town
The main square was hopping. People were using the public realm exactly as it was intended to be used — sitting, meeting, staying — and clamouring for the shade of the trees. In a fourth consecutive week of sunshine, tree canopy stopped being an amenity question and became a usability one.
Parking was tough here too. And once you step outside the immediate town centre, vacancy and dereliction become noticeable. The contrast within a short walk is stark: a well-used, well-populated core, and a fringe that has not yet caught up with it.
New Ross
New Ross was the surprise of the week. It has transformed since I worked here during the crash, and the transformation has taken an interesting route: rather than building outwards or new, the town has leaned on its own history and heritage — and the result feels contemporary and urban rather than preserved. The riverside walk is the clearest example. The best evidence that it works is who is using it: residents and local workers are occupying spaces you would assume had been laid on for tourists.
New Ross came up again and again, in other towns as well as its own, as the county’s most improved. It has always been beautiful. It is now attracting homeowners and business owners in a way it was not, and people were specific about why: the local authority has been proactive in tackling vacancy and dereliction in the town.
There is not much new development. But the potential to unlock both residential and commercial opportunity in the town centre is difficult to ignore. If you are househunting and had ruled New Ross out, it is worth a second look — and the same is true for business owners.
The roads
One county-wide observation. These were the busiest roads we have seen outside the capital. Locals were quick to point out how little of that traffic converts into local spend: few stops, little left behind. Movement through a place is not the same as engagement with it, and the distinction matters for any town whose main street doubles as a route to somewhere else.
The local market view
Declan O’Leary MIPAV of Sherry FitzGerald O’Leary Kinsella, with offices in Enniscorthy and Gorey, is the IPAV member for Wexford this week. His market read:
Gorey functions as a separate market. Price levels and buyer profile in the town track differently from the rest of the county.
Gorey’s buyers are largely Dublin buyers. Declan’s estimate is that around 80% commute to Dublin three days a week, and will travel further for more space and better value.
The Enniscorthy conversation now resembles the Gorey conversation of a decade ago. The same value-for-space calculation, one town further down the line.
Rosslare Europort is a market factor, not just a transport one. Post-Brexit growth in direct continental sailings, and the opening of Terminal 7 in November 2025, register locally in ways the county figures do not capture.
The Placemaking Data Baseline
Every county week in this series begins before we arrive. The Placemaking Data Baseline is robust, source-labelled research compiled in advance — completions, commencements, vacancy both commercial and residential, population change, household income, commuting patterns and modal split, new-tenancy rents at local electoral area level, availability on the sales and rental markets, short-term lets, and the county’s own infrastructure story. Every figure carries its source and its reference period. Commercial sources are labelled as commercial sources.
The ground time is then spent testing where the published data tracks lived experience and where it diverges. That gap is the point of the series.
In Wexford, the published data mostly held. The interesting exception was Gorey — a town that behaves like a market of its own, inside a county whose averages quietly absorb it. County-level figures are the right unit for national comparison and the wrong unit for local decisions, and Wexford makes that case better than most.
One item remains open at the time of writing: the Q2 2026 CSO new dwelling completions release is due imminently and may refresh the county’s completions position. It will be reflected in the baseline when it lands.
Notes from New Ross
I worked in New Ross from time to time during the crash. That period gave a lot of people a fixed picture of a lot of Irish towns, and those pictures have proved slow to update — often long after the town itself has moved on.
Walking the riverside this week, the thing that struck me was not the infrastructure. It was that nobody was treating it as a visitor attraction. People were using it on their way somewhere, or on their break, or because it was warm and it was there. That is the hardest thing to design for and the clearest sign that a place is working.
If there is one thing I would take from Wexford into the remaining 22 counties, it is that “most improved” is a category we do not have good data for — and one that residents recognise instantly.
Finally, on the coastal aspects, I grew up hearing about the significance of Hook Head (https://tidesandtales.ie/by-hook-or-by-crooke/) and have maintained a lifelong fascination with lighthouses ever since (one of my post-Covid highlights was staying in the lighthouse on Clare Island, off the Mayo coast, and I’m on a mission to visit and/or stay in all of the Great Lighthouses of Ireland!). And this lead to some research in advance of our arrival that influenced our perspective, particularly Rita Edwards’ chapter of on ‘Kilmore Quay, County Wexford, 1800–1900’, in Karina Holton, Liam Clare and Brian Ó Dálaigh (eds), ‘Irish Villages: Studies in Local History’ book – read a placemaking perspective on this at: https://caroltallon.com/nineteenth-century-infrastructure-delivery-record-from-kilmore-quay/
Photography: Katie Tallon MPRII
Corrections, additions and local knowledge are always welcome: carol@placeengage.com