Michelle Mulherin (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is important that we remember that we are proposing to put a sanction on somebody who owns property. The reason is that we have a housing shortage, and we want to address that. I have expressed my concerns about the issue of regeneration outside the context of the need for housing and the pressure that exists which requires us to take emergency action, but we have not had the full conversation on this. Many people have one-off units in areas of towns that are derelict. I will cite a case for the Minister of State. An older retired woman came to see me. The woman, who is on a non-contributory pension, has an old premises that she used to live in but that she had to leave. It was half commercial, half residential. It is an old building and she has priced what it would take to do up that building, which is €250,000. There is an old stone facade on it. The property is not worth that. We have to be careful that we are addressing a problem here and that we are not going overboard. This retired woman will not get a loan. There is no market there because there are several more properties up the street.

The story is not the same in every town and city, and I acknowledge the problem with housing and the needs in that regard, but in situations in which the market does not allow people to borrow or perhaps even sell in any reasonable fashion, we need to exercise more hesitancy in slapping vacant site levies on them. We have the Derelict Sites Act if an issue arises regarding the facade of a building or the visual amenity, but these are the realities for ordinary people. They are not developers or land holders and they would sell it. I have cited that case, and I know other properties in respect of which people have not told me their stories but I would be reasonably familiar with the situation. We have to protect such people. That is why the provision is included. It is not designed to get somebody who is a land hoarder out of the trap. We know land has been developed in the past that should not have been developed, which is an issue to do with development plans and how the development took place. Now we have areas of the country with empty houses. That is the irony. There are empty houses in my own town - new houses that are empty.

It is not a case of one size fits all. There are people who will be put in dire straits as a result of this. We should not cry over local authorities, who have much deeper pockets than the lady to whom I refer, who is on the non-contributory old age pension and would be caught out by an over-zealous plan. It is welcome that we confine it in this regard. I have reservations about the regeneration, but in some ways we have to leave that to councillors.

It will be tempered by the fact that anything we do here will also affect the local authority and its pockets.