Portumna Hotel to be placed on Derelict Sites Register

After years of dashed hopes, frustration and disappointment, the former Shannon Oaks Hotel in Portumna will be placed on the Derelict Sites Register for 2023.

In a statement sent to the Midland Tribune this week the Environment section of Galway County Council stated, “We can confirm that the site of the former Shannon Oaks Hotel & Country Club, St. Joseph’s Road, Portumna, Co. Galway – H53 F958 has been placed on the Derelict Sites Register for 2023 for County Galway.”

This means that its owners, the Comer brothers, will now be required to pay a derelict sites levy, amounting to 7% of the market value of the property for each year it remains on the register.

The news has been welcomed by a number of locals who have been patiently waiting for eleven years for work to begin on the vacant property. When the billionaire builders the Comer brothers took over the property in 2015, hopes ran high in the locality that at last something positive would happen but, unfortunately, the building work never got going.

Galway East Sinn Féin's Louis O’Hara welcomed the news and expressed hope that it will act as an incentive for the owners to progress its redevelopment. “At the very least it will raise revenue for the Council to tackle dereliction in the county,” he remarked, “but we are hoping now that this will persuade the owners to take action.”

He said the former hotel, once a very popular and much-loved venue in Portumna, was damaged in a fire “in 2011 and has been left lying idle and falling into ruin ever since.

“The Comer Brothers purchased the site in 2015, and have failed to redevelop the hotel, despite repeated promises and the granting of planning permission to do so.”

Mr O'Hara said the Shannon Oaks was the only hotel in Portumna, and “redeveloping it would be of huge benefit to the town and surrounding areas in terms of tourism, employment and as an amenity for the local community.”

He said it's unacceptable that the site has been left in its current state for so long, adding that the site is an eyesore, a health and safety hazard and a complete waste of valuable land.

“Sinn Féin have been pursuing this issue,” he continued, “and earlier this year Galway County Council wrote to the owners requesting them to secure the site and carry out remedial works on it. They failed to comply with this request with the result that the County Council has entered the hotel on the Derelict Sites Register for 2023.

“If this doesn't incentivise the owners to develop the property then we would hope that it would at least incentivise them to move it on to someone who will.

“The Derelict Sites Register news is positive but after so many years the Comers now need to get a move on with redeveloping the hotel. It is not good enough to leave this hotel derelict and idle for any longer and they cannot continue to ignore their responsibility to the local community.”