Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Councillors Hoade, Sheahan, Fennelly and Anglim, not just for attending our joint Oireachtas committee but for the work they do every day and week throughout the year representing our local authority members. As a former local authority member, I do not want to boast about it, I believe that fighting a local election is often much harder than any other election because one is contesting before people on one's street and in one's village.

Before we get on to the business of the LDA, the role of local authorities during the pandemic has to be acknowledged, not just the executive functions but all the elected representatives over the course of what has been an incredibly difficult year for our country. I commend LAMA and its members and acknowledge their work. I am also delighted the joint Oireachtas committee has the opportunity to have both the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG, and the Local Authorities Members Association, LAMA, attend, participate in, and contribute to, our pre-legislative scrutiny. We have also invited the County and City Management Association, CCMA, to attend and it will meet us at another meeting.

Coming from a local authority background myself, I understand the frustrations the councillors eloquently expressed on behalf of their members in terms of the way elected representatives' powers have been diminished but also, how their role as a frontrunner in terms of the provision of social and affordable housing falls far short of what it needs to be.

We see a huge opportunity with both the Land Development Agency Bill and, most important, the affordable housing Bill to empower local authorities and AILG and LAMA members to meet the housing need in their communities.

The biggest social housing programme in a decade is under way across the local authorities throughout the country. When we had the CCMA attend the joint Oireachtas committee to discuss the affordable housing Bill, I asked it about what targets it had set for the delivery of affordable housing, because local authorities will have the power to deliver affordable housing to purchase and to rent. The CCMA advised the committee it had not yet set a target for the delivery of affordable housing. That rings alarm bells for us.

As part of our work on the pre-legislative scrutiny of the affordable housing Bill, I proposed that every local authority, within six months of the legislation being passed, would be required to publish three, five and ten year targets for the delivery of affordable housing in their local authority area. The thinking behind that is each local authority would be identifying the affordable housing need is over three, five or ten years, but also, would be clearly signalling its target to the Department and that it will require funding for that. I also suggested the Department would have to approve applications from local authorities within six months.

I would appreciate feedback from both AILG and LAMA on whether they think those two interventions would help local authorities to scale up and start to deliver affordable homes to purchase and rent on their lands.