21/08/2026
🎙️ PLACEMAKING IN COUNTY MEATH
Over the past 8 weeks we have been travelling around Ireland for our 26-county, 26-week non-political placemaking tour of Ireland for the duration of the EU Council Presidency, speaking to local auctioneers (IPAV - Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers members), local authorities/planners, residents/families and business owners. This interview brings those perspectives together in one conversation.
*Recorded in Eureka House – a gem in the heart of the Walled Heritage Town of Kells – with Alan Crawford, Senior Executive Planner with Meath County Council, and Hubert W Morris MIPAV REV of Hugh Morris Alliance Auctioneers.
Good timing, too: we arrived in Kells on Day 1 of National Heritage Week. This year's The Heritage Council theme is 'Heritage at Risk' — and you could see the answer to it on the street, with scaffolding up on several buildings including the Round Tower, and the old Kells Printing Works reopened as a creative and educational hub with its printing machines recommissioned.
🔹 Meath is also the first county on this tour where the story is not dereliction. It has the lowest commercial vacancy rate of any county in Ireland — 10.0%, against a national 14.6% (GeoDirectory Commercial Vacancy Rates Report, Q4 2025, a commercial source).
🔹 It carries the longest average journey to work in the State, at 35.2 minutes against 29.1 nationally, and grew 13% between 2016 and 2022 (CSO Census 2022).
Hugh makes the case that the motorway — feared locally at the time, because bypasses had hollowed out retail elsewhere — did the opposite in Kells, and that the HGV ban and public realm work that followed are what turned road access into footfall.
Alan sets out what forward planning actually is, and why it stalls without data: a countywide settlement capacity audit, a social infrastructure audit, engagement with Uisce Éireann, ESB and EirGrid on where utility headroom exists, and a retail strategy built on granular fieldwork rather than county averages.
Also discussed: extending the current development plan to 2030 while drafting a ten-year plan behind it; over 400 submissions to the recent land-use zoning expression of interest; the argument for reviving public-private partnership for infrastructure; and why buyers keep asking for single-storey two- and three-bed homes that the density model does not deliver.
One exchange I keep coming back to. In Week 5 in Louth with Trevor Connolly at Love Drogheda BID, the mismatch we found was that Monday is now among the most common days to work from home, and still the day most cafés close. I asked the same question in Kells. The answer was that everything opens seven days, because the footfall is there from residents working remotely two or three days a week.
📽️ Watch in full: https://youtu.be/P9kFS0iaCBQ?si=8jKchENd_JtT9Nb-
🎧 Listen back: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7fPihoRNgpka7Ixkpbr1mv?si=__UsALAzSdGkIv2VnR8X5w
Full Placemaking Data Baseline for County Meath, with sources, at PLACEengage
