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

Like Deputy Daly, I do not want to be pejorative and it is not my wish to be in any way offensive, but we are discussing the kernel of the housing situation in terms of the public sector in this country. For a long time I have been an opponent of the replacement of the public sector building programme, as suggested by Deputies Daly and Coppinger, with housing provided through voluntary agencies. They are ideally placed to deal with sheltered housing and special needs. Local authorities are not in the same league and could never do such work. There are reasons for that.

In terms of the delivery of the main thrust of the requirements of local authority type housing throughout the country, it is the wrong vehicle. If we continue along this road, in five years' time the Chairman will be sitting in the same spot discussing the same issue. The member states of the European Union agreed to have a particular vehicle to deliver housing in order to ensure an off-balance sheet situation. It does not work.

A 100% capital grant, plus a maintenance grant, all of which, I presume, was available to local authorities, were given to housing bodies.

There is a replacement by the voluntary housing agencies of what the local authorities were doing. The biggest housing agency owns about 5,500 houses at present. It is the biggest landlord in the country. The point I want to make in particular is that the local authority housing officers will tell one straight out that they are competing with the voluntary agencies for the same funding coming from the same source. I cannot understand for one moment how the capital going from central government to the voluntary agency is agreed, is quite all right and in accord with all rules and regulations but the capital funding going to the local authorities to do the same thing is not. There is no reason for that. It is a technicality that was introduced for a particular purpose. To my mind it was a total and abject failure. My reason is that in this country there was a baseless theory, which still exists, that we should get away from owning houses, that Irish people were preoccupied with ownership and so on and that we should become like the Europeans who lease or rent their houses. We are not the same and we do not have the same traditions as people in all areas across Europe where they have different traditions. It works very well for them but it does not work here. Irish people want to have the potential of owning their own house for two reasons. They want to be able to improve it, expand it and call it their castle and part of their investment in life. They cannot do that with the voluntary agencies - it is as simple as that.

I want to emphasise that it is for this purpose that I am sitting here. I have dealt with this before and I know that we will be here in five years. This is no disrespect to the housing agencies at all but they are not the appropriate vehicle to deliver the volume of housing necessary in this country or any country with a similar requirement at this or any other time. For special needs and sheltered housing, there is no doubt in the world that they are by far and away the best providers. There is McAuley Place and various other places like it all over the country, which are excellent. The local authorities cannot compete with that. If we do not address this issue and deal with, we will not solve this problem.