Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for missing the start. I was at another meeting. I welcome the witnesses.

I will offer a bit of positivity. In my experience the housing agencies involved in projects in my county are considerably better equipped to carry out the management of the housing stock when it is in place. Accommodation that was built in approximately 2000 is as good and as well kept today as it was when it was built. I have proof of this, because I was involved in the construction. The local authorities have failed to maintain their housing stock as well as the housing agencies have. It seems to be down to resources.

The witness said that whatever rent roll the Irish Council for Social Housing gets is used for maintenance and future work, whereas when local authorities get in their rent roll they put it into the Central Fund and it is dissipated. We can build all the houses we are talking about, but if we do not maintain them, we will be back at it again. I see it in my own county. We built houses about 20 years ago and we will probably knock them down now to rebuild them. That is not how we want to operate in the future. We have to look at housing and estate management.

Obviously the Irish Council for Social Housing has a way of doing estate management that the local authorities do not. Would the council be willing to share that expertise with the local authorities in order that we can genuinely protect our housing stock?

That is the first question.

Second, one of the issues I have with the housing associations, which relates to the housing lists, is that an association gets a list of prospective tenants from a local authority and chooses from that. I think this is wrong. If the local authority has a housing list and the housing association has 20 units, the local authority should give the association 20 families to go into them and that should be it. The housing association should not have the veto on who is let into the houses. The position in this regard has to change.