ABSTRACT
This book has employed evidence from two rounds of research on seven urban neighbourhoods in Ireland to examine social change and the local impact of public policies for the ten-year period between 1997–8 and 2007–9. Much of the original round of research has already been reported on (Fahey, 1999). In the present study we add both a ten-year follow-up on the seven neighbourhoods, along with some further reflection on both the original and the follow-up findings viewed together. All of the seven neighbourhoods examined here were originally constructed by local authorities for letting as social housing, but due to the longstanding policy of sale of social-rented dwellings to tenants in Ireland, most now contain large proportions of homeowner households and many include some dwellings let by private landlords and other social landlords such as housing associations. However, the neighbourhoods continue to draw much of their identity and character from their origins in the social housing system and from the continuing relationship that many residents have with local authorities as landlords. Furthermore, they share an important socioeconomic characteristic with the wider social-rented tenure in Ireland – all seven suffer high levels of disadvantage relative to the Irish population at large and, as explained in Chapter 2, three of the case study neighbourhoods are among the 5 per cent of the most disadvantaged in Ireland.
