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

I thank Professor Drudy for attending. I agree with many of the things he has just stated because, as we all know, we have discussed this issue for the past couple of weeks. However, I do not agree in respect of changing over our system to a reliance on rental, whether private or public. The reason I do not is because when that idea was first mooted ten or 15 years ago, and there was a switch from the local authorities to the private rental system, although everybody said at the time, almost without contradiction, that this was the answer and we were going to be like the Europeans, it did not work, for a variety of reasons. The people in this country take personal pride in owning their own home; it is an investment for them. However, the most important thing is security, in that nobody can tell them to get out or to move on. Nobody can say what was said at the time, namely, we want more movement in the housing population. We do not want that; we want security.

As the Chairman knows, many of us spent years on the local authorities and we have learned from unfortunate experiences. I remember that during the 1980s, the local authority of which I was a member produced almost 1,000 houses each year, 50% by way of direct build and 50% by way of the thing which has not been mentioned by anybody, the local authority loan. At the time, the local authority loan even covered loans for young gardaí, young nurses and other young professionals - everybody - and it applied within certain income limits. At some stage, we had to apply certificates of reasonable value to prevent speculation and racketeering in the whole house purchase and building business.

I remember intoning all of this to a well-known member of the charitable sector who will be before the committee later on.

Twenty years ago I predicted that we would have this crisis - and wrote about it at the time - simply because we were relying on rental property. We shifted away completely from the local authority loans and we called it "social housing". Remember? It was never social housing before that. It was local authority housing: we spoke of county council houses and county council loans. I suggest that we go back - and I ask Professor Drudy to what extent he thinks it is possible to do so - to the system of reliance on direct build for a section of the market and, at the same time, the local authority loan system. We should also remember that, at the time to which I refer, people were borrowing from banks or building societies. The latter were mutual societies, they were not in competition with the banks. It was only when the banks entered the arena of lending for housing purposes - particularly one bank that came into this country and left again in a hurry - that the outrageous level of loan offers started. The Bank of Scotland, as everybody knows, was involved in this regard and then withdrew from the scene: gone, finished.

I will conclude with an example. A couple of years ago I was involved in a voluntary housing group. We formed a company, bought the sites from the local authority - the same sites which, as I have said, were available to the approved housing bodies for free; we paid €20,000 for them - and handed the finished houses over to the owners. They were owners, not tenants. At that time, the cost to them was exactly half what the houses were on the private market. Remember, we had to buy them. They were bought. The voluntary housing bodies that were all supposed to be the solution to all our problems got them for free, for €1 per site. They were serviced sites. That is all gone. They had to qualify on income grounds and so on. I strongly urge - and I ask Professor Drudy to consider as a solution - the reversion to the division between the direct build and local authority loans. I have no doubt that we would not be where we are now if we had retained the latter.