Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to come back to an area that may have been covered earlier. I apologise if it was because, like Deputy O'Reilly, I was in the Chamber. I refer to compulsory purchase orders, CPOs. Local authorities have spent millions on what could be described as the unsuccessful pursuit of properties. In many cases, it is not as much the availability of resources as the chilling effect a bad case can have. Local authorities ask why they would spend hundreds of thousands of euro pursuing a single property when it might get nowhere in the courts and it could spend the money on developing housing. One of the big issues we have is a reluctance by officials to go down the road of CPOs at all. Whatever powers we give and whatever changes we make in the area, we must also give confidence to local authority officials that they can pursue matters.

The second point is that it is far too cumbersome to secure properties. I do not represent the area any longer, but there are two properties on Walsh Road and everybody in the whole of Drumcondra knows the two houses are collapsing in on top of each other. There are huge problems. Ten years after I raised the issue on the council, those properties are still there for all the complicated reasons that exist. There are many similar properties around Dublin city. Often, it can come down to the financial capacity of the owners of the properties or other limiting capacities. People may have other issues. On a different site in my area, somebody inherited a very large property but does not have the mental health resilience to be able to take on a project of that size. Active land management must be the key here. We need to empower local authorities not just to tackle vacancy but to undertake active land management whereby solutions are put together for landowners that otherwise would not have the financial or business acumen or inclination to proceed with a project.

Providing them is one thing, but sometimes local authorities have to put together a solution to unlock the potential of a site. Vacancy officers are one element in the equation, but in Ballymun, for example, we have an economic officer specifically for that electoral district within the city. It is unique to Dublin City Council. He actively tries to unlock the potential of units that are developed, for example, that have large fit-out costs or leases that are taking too long to get through the local authority or for whatever other reason. That is what we need to see both in terms of vacancy and CPOs. I ask Ms Graham to tackle those big areas.