Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Housing is a massive issue. It always has been a big issue but the problem now is that the goal posts have moved dramatically in the last number of years. The Minister of State is responsible for housing and may God help her. She has a very difficult task and if the Government is not prepared to give her any money, that makes it even more difficult.

A media outlet in Wexford contacted me a number of weeks ago and encouraged me to have a kick at the local authority because it was not providing the housing that people would have liked. The truth of the matter was that the local authority in Wexford received €1.5 million last year for housing. It received €25 million in 2006 and the amount has been dwindling ever since. It got a little more this year, admittedly, with an allocation of €2.7 million. That will allow the authority to build 19 units but there are 2,300 people on the housing waiting list. That problem is not going to be solved without money. I realise that the Government does not have an endless supply of money but as others have said, we make choices as to what we do with the money we have.

We must take a serious look at housing in Ireland now. We need proper, long-term planning. I could talk all day about the different aspects that need attention. Father Peter McVerry spoke about homeless recently and pointed out that there were six new homeless people every day and the State was struggling to cater for two of them each time. How the Government is going to deal with that - if it is going to deal with it - I do not know. Father McVerry is at the coalface and is pretty demoralised about what he is facing.

A big problem, if one looks back over recent years, is the fact that the whole thinking has changed.

We do not seem to think that people have a social right to houses anymore and that is why we do not build social housing. The Government provides a lot of money through the rent supplement but I think it is a false economy. It is vital that we start building social housing again. It does not seem to fit with neoliberalism, however, which is the philosophy that comes down the tracks morning, noon and night from Europe. They do not like the idea of the State providing so many services and they are eager to have them cut. Housing has certainly been a victim of that.

There are currently approximately 90,000 people on the social housing waiting list but I do not know what the Government's long-term plans are. Does it intend to engage in a massive house-building project? It is a bit mad that, for all practical purposes, the private sector is unregulated. We do not control what happens there, including the numbers built, where they are built or the levels of rent. It is not easy to control rent but it is possible to try. We have seen the Europeans do it lately. In some European countries rents cannot rise by more than 15% in three years. They also limit the amount at which rent can start by the average in a particular district and surrounding districts. That is a start and it addresses the issue in some way. We need to have far more control over what happens in housing in Ireland, not just in State public housing but also in the private sector.

Another issue concerns the type and quality of housing, which is a massive problem. If housing is required in Dublin city centre, for example, one can forget about building houses because there is no space for them, so one will have to build apartments. We cannot build the apartments that we have been building for social housing purposes, however, because they are not fit for purpose in my opinion. I have been in housing estates in Turin and Rome to see how they work. They are far more usable and tend to be bigger than here. Apartments have higher ceilings, bigger balconies and more playing space for kids. They work like houses whereas our apartments do not. Our apartments were not even built for private families, not to mention those on the social housing list who tend to have bigger families, so it is more demanding to house them properly.

The apartments we built over the last 15 or 20 years were designed for couples or single people, but not for children. I built loads of them myself and we tried to address some of those issues but it was very difficult. For example, we started putting in high ceilings in our apartment complexes but we were losing floors as a result. If one loses a floor it is harder to get the finance to build such properties. The State should play a part in that regard by stating that if somebody is putting four floors in an apartment block, with ten-foot ceilings instead of eight-foot ones to make them better quality living spaces, the local authority should facilitate that. If a floor is taken away it might make the project unbankable, however. Not everybody who builds has billions behind them in the bank. The majority of people who were building worked from project to project. That was borne out by the crisis because once trouble came they could not deal with it and ran out of business. Most of those who were speculating in building houses and apartments, collapsed and were forced out of the business.

We need to think about the quality of the product. That leads us to the Minister, Deputy Hogan's, latest attempt to deal with problems like Priory Hall. I am disappointed that the Government has not dealt with the main problem which is a lack of supervision of construction work, which is not being assessed. There is mostly an increase in paperwork and more signing off on different aspects. However, no facility has been put in place whereby somebody would be on site to watch what is being done and check that it is being done properly. Until that is done one will not get the quality product required for social and private housing.

The Part 5 agreement meant that one had to provide 20% for social or affordable housing, or a combination of both. What builders were doing in a lot of those cases was scandalous, however, because they were deciding in advance which ones they would sell privately, which ones would be given to the social or affordable part, and they were building them completely differently. Every item going into them was different. That was cheating but there was nobody there to see them doing it and no one checked on them. Therefore they did what they could get away with. That is wrong but if they cannot be trusted there should be greater supervision. For the life of me I cannot understand why the Minister, Deputy Hogan, has not dealt with that serious problem. I realise it is an expense for the local authority but it would be money well spent.

I realise I have strayed a bit and my time is up.

See this speech in context