Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the work that has been done on this issue by the Minister of State and his officials. We disagree with the Government in many respects and we criticise it when we feel the need to do so. However, it has the full and enthusiastic support of Sinn Féin in this instance. We fully support all 32 recommendations. We do so with a degree of discomfort in some cases. We cannot come up with a better way to address these issues than the way that has been recommended by the experts. Even though some of the recommendations go against the grain of our general policy thrust - I am thinking in particular of the issues of planning and land disposal, to which I will come in a moment - we will give the Government our full support in this case. In the absence of someone having a better set of proposals, these recommendations are all that are on the table. I assure the Minister of State of our support in respect of them.

I would like to express a certain degree of frustration because two and a half years have passed since the Housing Agency published the Michelle Norris report. This process has taken much longer than we all hoped. It is important to get into implementation quickly. While I respect the need for the Minister of State to listen to what people have to say about the best way to implement the report, I emphasise that we need to get on with implementing it. Most of the key players in this area will accept that point. Some previous Government action plans have not been that good. If we have a good action plan with clear timelines in this case, that would be welcome. This committee would like an opportunity to monitor such an action plan and to engage with the Minister of State and his officials on it on a regular basis. That would enable us to ascertain how much progress is being made and to give the Minister of State any support we can.

Many Opposition Deputies and Senators are not members of this committee and have not participated in our lengthy debates on this issue. I have spoken to the Minister of State about the need for him to engage directly with other Opposition parties to bring them through the dialogue we have had. I urge him to provide for such engagement as a way of ensuring their decisions on this matter are made with as much information as possible.

I would like to mention something else about which I am deeply concerned. As of October, 70% of this year's Traveller accommodation budget had not been spent. Fourteen local authorities had spent nothing and four local authorities had requested nothing. One of the local authorities in the latter category was Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, which covers the area where the Carrickmines tragedy took place. I cannot understand how any local authority, particularly a large local authority with a large Traveller community, can fail to request money or fail to spend money. It is beyond belief. I want to make a clear link between the failure of these local authorities to spend money and the growth in the number of Traveller families in unauthorised developments. Over the three years between 2016 and 2018, there was a significant increase in such developments. The Minister of State is familiar with this problem because we have discussed an illegal or unauthorised site in my local authority area. These living arrangements are bad for Traveller families and their children and for neighbouring settled communities. It is particularly bad to think that many of these cases are caused by local authorities sending back large sums of unspent money. The general public needs to understand that the root cause of unauthorised encampments is the failure of local authorities to spend the money they are given. It would be useful if people started putting pressure on local authorities to spend that money as a way of resolving this problem.

I have three specific questions about the matters at the heart of the report. First, even though all of the recommendations are good, the things that will make or break this initiative are the interaction between the proposed changes to the Part 8 planning permissions and the section 183 land disposals, the strengthened role of the national Traveller accommodation committee and the ability of that committee to have recourse to the regulator to force managers to act if they do not use these changed powers. The Minister of State can do everything else with all the data and all the governance - and that will be really helpful - but if the changes I have listed are not made, none of this will work and accommodation needs will not be addressed. I would like to hear the thinking of the Minister of State and his officials on these issues. At what point will the Minister of State be able to give us a timeline in this regard? The closer we get to the election, the more difficult matters will become. We need to move on that.

Second, the Minister of State has given us a great deal of detail about teams and all the rest of it. Will a single dedicated person in the Department be overseeing this process? If so, what level of seniority will that official have? That will be a key aspect of this work. As Ms Hurley very well knows, when someone is being sent in to butt heads with a county or city manager, it makes a difference if he or she is a principal officer or is at another grade. What level of seniority will this official have? Will this be his or her only job? Will he or she work on nothing but this for the initial period of implementation? Such a person would be able to drive this process. I accept that the Department is very busy with all of its other activities.

The third thing, which I have said to Ms Hurley before and referred to in some parliamentary questions, is that in addition to a quarterly report, the separate and very useful social housing construction pipeline report must include the Traveller new builds. Too much money has been spent on the refurbishments and not enough on new accommodation. The only way we can track that is if the social housing construction pipeline has a subsection in it every quarter that tells us what projects are in the pipeline and where they are at in the process. I cannot recommend that enough.