Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for coming before the joint committee. They have touched on a very important subject, to which there are two aspects: developing and developed countries which are very different. I have been deeply involved for quite a long time in improving housing conditions. In this country many thousands of people are virtually homeless because of the situation that has been evolving for several years. Serious forward planning is required in dealing with housing provision, at least ten years in advance. There is no sense in trying to do it a year or two years in advance. In developing countries one has the advantage of providing good quality housing from the beginning on what is virtually a greenfield site. It is easier and more cost-effective to do it that way. We can learn from experience. It is very easy to obtain dramatic results in a short space of time, using a multiplicity of agencies, taking advantage of aid and the natural environment which can be helpful or unhelpful. Development in the United States takes place in Roman-type grids with straight lines which are simple to follow. We do not like that system in this country and did not take that route. In the United States they started with greenfield sites and used all of the knowledge and information available from Roman times. We have forgotten some of the basic things learned during years, particularly about irrigation, as was seen during the flooding in the United Kingdom. Modern engineers have forgotten these things.

I have been deeply opposed to the emergence of voluntary housing. This is not a shot at Habitat for Humanity, but 15 years ago I predicted that it would fail to address the issues involved and it did. There was a tendency which remains to some extent to provide public authority housing by using the semi-private sector, but that did not work for a multiplicity of reasons. We are now in the situation about which my colleagues have talked and it is too late, as the crisis is upon us. Some like-minded colleagues and I have spoken about it in the House. I was castigated in the media for some of the things I had said in the House 15 years ago, but these issues come back to bite us eventually and we are now trying to patch up a crisis which is not so easy to do. Everybody believes there are houses available, that the National Asset Management Agency has them, but we do not have them in the places where they are needed, where the population is. They are in other parts of the country where the population does not require such accommodation. Sadly, the forward planning was appalling and we now have to live with it.

A few years ago at the peak of the boom I was involved in a local authority initiative to provide affordable housing for people on the local authority housing list. We built approximately 100 houses. Unlike the private voluntary housing association, we did not get the sites for free or €1 each; we had to pay €25,000 for them. We were able to build houses on these sites from the local authorities for between €135,000 and €175,000. When they were sold to the tenants, they were on the market at between €390,000 and €420,000. That gives one an idea of the nonsense that was going on and we knew full well what was happening. There was a lot of profiteering in the business. The State moved away from providing houses for people from industrial wage level down, those who would ordinarily qualify for local authority housing, because it was too much trouble to provide them. That was a woeful mistake and the consequences are now being felt. It is a serious crisis.

To go back to the Romans - Senator David Norris would be an expert in this area because he soldiered with them - it is important to remember that as the standard of living and the quality of life increase in every civilisation, the population falls; whether we like it, that is the way it happens.