Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses from the Department for their attendance. Having listened to Senator Cummins and to Deputy Gould, I accept that we all have different angles, but the one commonality is to provide as much housing as possible for people who need houses and who are in a desperate way in different situations around the different counties. In the neck of the woods that I come from, starting in the town of Kenmare and coming out the top of the town in my mind I just counted all of the vacant house out to Kilgarvan, not even half a mile off of the road. There is a fairly good CIÉ service there with Bus Éireann for public transport. All the way through Kilgarvan and eastwards down into Killarney, and a good seven miles out from Killarney, in that 12 or 14 miles of road, there are 55 houses vacant. I hear people talking about exorbitant figures for rent. If you decided to rent out one of those houses, you could only command maybe €600 or €700 a month. There the trouble starts because if a person is in the higher tax bracket, he or she must pay 52% of that €600 or €700.

The person is then left with €300 or €350 to pay for insurance and all the other things he or she has to pay for in order to keep the house standing. If the person rents it out, he or she is responsible for the fridge, the cooker and different things. That is one of the reasons those houses are vacant. I have a suggestion on this that I have raised in the Dáil. An offer of €800 tax-free was offered to house owners - I do not like the word "landlord" - to accommodate people fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. Could that be expanded to allow the individuals who own these houses to make up to €800 tax-free out of their houses? That would be one way.

These people have another big problem. There has been much talk of eviction and eviction notices. The problem is many house owners are afraid that if they rent out their house, they cannot get it back. There has been an awful lot of hay made about the ending of the eviction ban, but there is still an eviction ban there in a way because I understand that if someone stays paying their rent and the house owner has to go through the legal process to get his or her house back, it could take up to four years. People cannot or will not put themselves in that situation, because they might want to get the house back to sell it or want it back to put a family member into it. That timeframe is therefore too long. People will then have to deal with the RTB, which is overregulating the thing to the point people are afraid to rent out their homes because they are afraid they will not be able to get them back. If the renter is not paying at all, it can take a full 12 months to go through the legal process.

Those are the blockages I see, and they are just with the 55 houses. In places like Rathmore, Brosna, Knocknagoshel and different villages, the houses are there but people just will not let them for that kind of money and put themselves in jeopardy of not getting them back. We could do much more about the empty houses we have in our areas. It may different up here in Dublin, down in Cork or in Waterford where the Senator comes from.

We have another problem, namely, planning permission for young couples or young fellows who want to build their own houses. Family members on farms are accommodated and that is great. I appreciate it and love to see a young fellow building a house and staying on the farm. He can be beside his parents as they get older. They work together and the parents can mind the children and they can mind the parents. It works well. However, another type of person will not get planning permission and we need to look at the issue. Let us say there is a farm. The farmer's son or daughter will get the permission and that is grand, but there could be a fellow living in a cottage all this life and his parents lived there too. He will not get permission in some or many of the designated areas, because they are deemed an area under urban pressure. If he is out the road in Muckross or up in Spa or wherever, he is treated the very same as if he were coming out from Killarney. That is unfair on those type of people.