International law requires governments to progressively realise rights, including the right to adequate housing, and to mobilise all available resources to do so. However there are legitimate questions about the extent to which public resources in Northern Ireland are being used to realise rights, as PPR raised in its May 2025 response to the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing’s call for input on the relationship between land governance and the right to housing.

This is an issue of real weight, and not just because of the ever-worsening housing shortage: a Belfast Telegraph investigation into vacant public land in 2023-24 found that Stormont departments owned 940 acres of empty buildings or disused land across the north, costing the public purse £6.4m to maintain since 2019.

This is despite 2018 Department of Finance guidance on disposal of surplus public assets -- defined as “any land or property in the ownership of the public sector bodies which is no longer required for the purpose for which it was acquired or held” (p. 4) -- which

resulted from an increased demand for rigour and transparency in the disposal process, and to provide additional guidance to asset owners and other interested parties on new disposal routes such as Community Asset Transfer (p. 5).

Given that the Department for Communities (or its predecessor departments) have owned the Mackie’s site – Belfast’s largest publicly owned disused tract of land, in the area of highest housing need in the city -- since early this century, and that most of it remains undeveloped, it seemed valid to ask the Department whether it had applied the DOF guidance in this case.

In response to Freedom of Information requests, the Department of Finance said that it holds no information on the site, while the Department for Communities said that it “has not declared the lands in question as surplus. The land was acquired and held for development or redevelopment”.

So does not declaring the land to be surplus exempt the Department from ‘rigour and transparency in the disposal process’?

History of the Mackie’s site

The James Mackie & Sons foundry and factory operated in West Belfast for half of the 19th and most of the 20th century. It made textile machinery and, during WWII, munitions for the war effort. After several decades of decline, it closed in 1999.

The site remained vacant and in ownership of the now- Department for Communities, the government body responsible for “the provision of decent, affordable, sustainable homes and housing support services” and “addressing inequality and disadvantage”, as obligated and empowered under Section 75 of the NI Act (1998) and the St Andrew’s Agreement (2008).

In 2014 and 2015, housing campaigners with the Equality Can't Wait group carried out a photomapping exercise to identify vacant sites in areas of housing need around Belfast. The Mackie’s site was one of the largest and most prominent sites featured in its March 2015 report, Surrounded by land but ‘no space’ for housing?; photomapping the Belfast land which could be used to tackle the housing crisis. Families in housing need and their supporters have been campaigning for social housing on the site ever since.

A small part of the south eastern end of the site was acquired by Invest NI (part of the Department for the Economy); in 2017, using government and European Union funds, it built the ‘Innovation Factory’ there to ‘support [ ] Belfast’s growing entrepreneurial community’.

In 2023 Belfast City Council opened the Forth Meadow Community Greenway, section 2 of which incorporates around one third of the remaining Mackie’s site and is currently held by Council under license from the Department for Communities. A formal transfer has been pending for years but – as per FOI responses in February 2025 – has yet to be completed.

As for the remainder, “the Department and BCC have an agreement in place to work together to consider future phases of the greenway on the lands”. Plans for yet more park, apparently, and an expansion of the existing greenway, which is already situated between Paisley Park on the one side and Woodvale Park on the other. No homes.

Meanwhile the Take Back the City coalition continues to push for land justice for the ever-growing number of homeless families in Belfast, continuing to campaign for homes on the still-vacant, still-publicly owned bulk of the Mackie’s site.