Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support the points Deputy Canney made. We are looking for the help-to-buy and the Rebuilding Ireland home loan schemes to be extended not just to new builds but also to second-hand properties. As the Minister will be aware, the census in 2016 highlighted that there are 80,000 homes vacant across the country that could have families in them. Some of these homes have fibre-optic cable outside the door. Many of them are in close proximity to schools that do not have existing pressures on them, to childcare facilities and to other amenities. Some of these houses are in housing estates where there has not been a football kicked on the streets in perhaps 30 years because many of them now are home to older people. Younger families have not moved into these areas. We have seen huge levels of depopulation across many of our provincial towns and rural villages. There is an opportunity here to revitalise these communities while also taking pressure off new-build housing in our bigger towns and cities. What we are looking for, therefore, is that the incentives in place be made available to first-time buyers purchasing second-hand properties and that they also be extended for the refurbishment of those properties - not just the refurbishment of existing residential accommodation but also the refurbishment of what were previously commercial premises.

In many of our villages and smaller towns, commercial premises have closed and are lying vacant. If we could get families back into those communities, it would bring a new life, new blood, into them, particularly with many people now working remotely. Pretty much all of our villages have fibre-optic cable. Many of our towns are getting fibre-optic cable as we speak from some of the commercial operators. There is a huge opportunity for those people who can work remotely now to relocate from Dublin and the major urban centres, especially if they have young families, and to avoid commuting for hours into the city, improving their quality of life.

There is an opportunity to bring back numbers into local schools to make them viable. The State has already paid significant amounts of money to construct and redevelop these schools and it has put in significant amounts of investment in terms of existing infrastructure. It makes a lot of sense.

Deputy Doherty spoke earlier about the current structure of the two schemes and that they are pushing up property prices. He referenced the research from the ESRI and from our own Parliamentary Budget Office on this. If this were extended beyond exclusively new homes it would take off some of the pressure while, at the same time, bring life back into areas where there have been significant problems with depopulation up to now and where there have been significant problems with dereliction. It would be a win-win situation for everyone.