Angry residents of a new housing estate in Claremorris, Co Mayo, picketed the entrance to their estate yesterday to protest over the selling by the developer of 16 houses to the local authority.
A local resident and one of the protesters, Ms Susan Vahey, claims the level of frustration and anger among the new homeowners in the Clareville estate was rising.
"We bought our houses as part of a private housing development less than a year ago. At the time we were not given any indication by the developers that they intended selling 16 of the 65 houses in the estate to Mayo County Council for social housing.
"We have no problem with the people who will come to live in these houses, our concern is that our houses will have dropped in resale value.
"We are just ordinary people, working extraordinarily hard to meet monthly mortgage payments and we believe that the developer, MacCormack and Hertridge, should have told us about their plans for the estate," she said.
Mayo county secretary Mr Gilbert Grourke said the local authority advertised a number of months ago looking for houses.
"The developers at Clareville, Claremorris, responded to that advertisement and we have purchased 16 homes from them.
"The 16 houses will be divided fairly evenly between social housing and affordable housing," said Mr Grourke.
"There are 100 families in the Claremorris area on the local authority housing list. Some of these people will obviously be accommodated in Clareville.
"The rest of the houses will, as was recommended in the Bacon report, be taken up under `affordable housing', where middle-income people will be given a long-term loan from the authority, together with their own private funds, to get into the housing market," he said.