Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Deputy to let me answer. We have an agreement with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to spend €32 million to go through an initial phase which will involve approximately 800 to 1,000 units with the money that is available. That money is available this year. We will be working through approved housing bodies, AHB, and local authorities to try to get properties back into use where there is the most need. I think there will be some repair and leasing schemes in rural areas, but the majority will be in urban areas where there is the most social housing need. There are other things that we need to do to help people to repair homes in rural areas. The Minister, Deputy Michael Noonan, has announced initiatives around that involving home improvements and tax incentives.

This is primarily part of a social housing strategy. We have to focus on the parts of the country that have the most social housing need, and we have to put money into getting private houses into long-term lease arrangements that can accommodate people on social housing lists. To be clear, it is not a loan, per se, although I suppose it could be called that. It is essentially a local authority or an AHB getting money from us to fund the repairs that are needed in a house and then factoring in the repayment of that money over a five to ten year period through the rent that will be paid. It is a loan of sorts, but it is really to deal with the cashflow problem that many private property owners might have.

I suspect there are many cases in Kerry whereby if somebody had €15,000 to be able to do up a house to make it available for lease for the next ten years, he or she would probably do it. As people may not have the money immediately, they cannot change the boiler or do up the house or whatever. That certainly seems to be a barrier from anecdotal evidence and we will now test it with the new repair and leasing scheme. We will see how it goes. If we get 800 units delivered quickly, we will certainly go back to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to try to get sanction to do much more. I would like to spend hundreds of millions of euro on this if we could, but currently we have sanction to spend €32 million. We need to show that it works and many people are saying to me they think it will. Let us wait and see.

I would also like approved housing bodies to be a big part of this. Local authorities can of course do it but sometimes, particularly in Dublin, we find organisations like Respond!, Clúid, Focus Ireland, the Peter McVerry Trust and maybe others may well want to put people on the ground, knocking on doors, asking private property owners whether they would engage with this process and make their properties available, especially if they are in areas with much social housing demand. That kind of proactivity on the street is exactly what we need to try to get units delivered quickly. We will also be sending guidance to all local authorities on repair and leasing, how it can work and where the priorities should be. Nobody will be in any doubt in that regard.

There is a broader issue of helping people in rural areas to get vacant properties into use. We will be launching a vacant housing strategy as part of the overall housing strategy. We said we would have that done by the end of the second quarter of this year and the Housing Agency has been working hard on that. We will launch that and there will be a focus on trying to get as many of the 200,000 or so vacant residential properties in the country into use as we can by incentives. It is an obvious answer that Deputy Casey and others have referred to for very good reason.

I will be a little careful in what I say about Arklow as I am told there are legal proceedings under way with some of the issues. I do not want to say anything that may influence those cases. In general, the idea that we have towns and cities with very significant vacancy percentages while we are trying to build new housing developments on greenfield sites that must get services and wastewater treatment facilities etc. seems to be madness. We have to focus on existing infrastructure and getting the most out of that as well as adding new infrastructure. We have 43 towns where raw sewage is going into rivers, lakes and harbours. In my own city of Cork, 50,000 houses are pumping raw sewage into the harbour every single day. I am told that amounts to approximately 34,000 wheelie bins full of wastewater every day going into a harbour I have grown up beside. That is not acceptable and the issue will be solved within the next 12 months or so as Irish Water puts infrastructure in place to deal with the matter. That needs to be replicated in places like Arklow and elsewhere.

We have been speaking to people in Irish Water to ensure its capital investment programme, particularly around wastewater treatment, matches the housing plan in order that it focuses resources on where houses are likely to be built in the next few years. A number of developers come to our housing delivery unit saying they can deliver a specific number of houses on zoned land, in some cases with planning, but they do not have the necessary water infrastructure to facilitate that. Most of them come before getting planning as they are afraid they will not get it because the infrastructure will not facilitate housing development. It is a big issue and we must work in parallel with Irish Water in the same way we would have worked with local authorities on water provision in the past to ensure we are investing in a sensible way in terms of roads, water and other infrastructure in facilitating new housing development. In particular we must focus on using existing infrastructure. It is a no-brainer, to be honest.

We now have a multi-annual rural water programme for 2016 to 2018, with various funding measures around public health compliance, enhancement of existing schemes, rural group water schemes, and a transition of schemes from public water to the wastewater sector. A series of investments are happening and because we can give some certainty around multi-annual investment, it makes it easier to deliver on that. There will be more of that. If we are serious about creating counterbalances to Dublin with respect to increasing populations in other parts of Ireland, water infrastructure will be core in doing that. It will cost money, which is why the decisions we make around how we pay for domestic water supply cannot simply just be on the basis of being popular all the time. We must make some decisions that are good for the country as well as being acceptable to the vast majority of people and political parties.

With regard to the baseline calculation for local property tax, LPT, my understanding is there is a method of doing this that is fair to everybody, based on issues like population density, overall population and investment criteria. In particular there is a link to what those local authorities would have been spending in the past to try to maintain a core level of service. That is why, from last year to this year, the one thing I insisted upon was that no local authority would lose out with the LPT allocation on what was available last year. I would happily have a conversation with the committee on managing LPT, how we prioritise and how we create a redistribution of resources to ensure rural Ireland does not lose out. I assume if Deputy Danny Healy-Rae was still here, I expect he would have pretty strong views on counties that simply do not have the population density to be able to pay for the resources they need.