Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming in and wish Ms Houlihan and her team the best of luck. In the agricultural sector and in rural Ireland, we should speak very openly. The first thing is that there is a crazy gang at the moment talking about one-off housing as not sustainable. If a person builds a house out in the countryside, there is no footpath on the road provided by the council, there is no street lighting and you have to pay for your own water. The roads are there and, bad as it is, they are hardly going to get rid of the roads. The roads have cost what they have cost up to now, so they are not making more new roads anywhere. The ESB came around Ireland, thankfully, and, it is to be hoped, in the coming years, broadband will come around. Therefore, the infrastructural cost to the State is no more and it is only about the maintenance of the road. This myth about the unsustainability of rural one-off housing needs to be put to bed fairly quickly because, obviously, the people who are talking about it do not understand what the main sewer, treatment plants and pumping up water from the countryside to keep the thirst off them has cost. That needs to be the first thing.

In fairness, for anybody, young or old, the initiative by the Government with the €70,000 and the €50,000 is okay, and I would be happy with it. The one thing we are getting blocked by, and it is a huge problem, concerns the second part of the money people need from the banking sector. I will give an example from near my own area and I will name Bank of Ireland because I think it needs to come out in the open. There is inconsistency by banks where a person is trying to buy a house and wants a HomeBond. This is happening around the country. Those houses might have been built in 2010 or 2011 and are being finished off now, so there is no HomeBond. AIB will accept that and grant a mortgage without this HomeBond but Bank of Ireland will not. This is the inconsistency for young people trying to get on.

The second inconsistency concerns the planning. In Roscommon during the week, I saw a situation where an extension to a dwelling for a living room out the back was refused because it would not coincide with the landscape. There are cows in the fields on each side of that house and land on each side. Whatever the planners believe about landscape, this is what is going on and these are the inconsistencies between counties. The message has to come from the Government that we are in a housing crisis and if someone is willing to do up an older house and put an extension out the back to make it liveable, it should be possible.

The third area is one where I will advise people because you learn as you go along. Everyone believes they nearly need a 3000 sq. ft. house, whether they are 20, 50 or 60, or getting to my age. Anyone would be wondering who will be staying in the house because they will be gone - the birds fly from the nest, to be quite frank about it. A reasonably-sized, tidy house can still be built for reasonable money.

The fourth thing is that we need a cast-iron guarantee on national routes where the NRA or TII is involved. If a youngster wants to build a house beside his or her parents, maybe they would swap over and that young person might build a two-bedroom house that the parents would go into, and they would be prepared to come out a shared driveway, which was always the rule down the years with regard to being able to come out on those roads because it was a TII road. However, at the moment, the minute anyone puts in for planning, some genius in TII is objecting. The Government will have to get involved because that is blocking an awful lot of stuff. This is where people are downsizing to a smaller house and the parents are to go into one house and the children into the other house and so on.

There is another thing that I would like the witnesses’ opinion on. There are 100,000 holiday homes in the country. They are there and I do not think we can take them off anyone, so they are going to be there. What is the witnesses’ view on what we do with them? Do we just leave them alone because they are there?

The fifth thing I want to talk about is derelict properties.

If there is a shack of a house where the walls are not good, and if someone is prepared to belt down most of the walls and rebuild it, up to now the situation has been very hazy. It is the definition of a council or the person that comes out that if one does not leave some parts of the walls, then one will not get the grant. That needs clearance, even if every bit of wood had to be taken out, a wall knocked and built back. The other issue that needs tidying up, which is a damnable situation, is that people registered their septic tanks and there might be problems with them now. It is like the lotto. If people are lucky enough that they come to them this year, they will get the grant if they have to do it up but if they are not lucky, well it might still be heading off into the stream. That is the reality. We need to change these things.

The fundamental point, which a lot of the witnesses touched on, is the gap. In fairness there may be an avenue with some councils, but the paperwork is horrendous to get funding or a loan. There needs to be some flexibility. They are not looking for free money, let us be very clear on that. They are looking for the likes of something that is State-backed, no more than there were a few State-backed loans for farmers that would help them to fill that gap. Unfortunately, it is all about figures now with banks. It is all about income and expenditure and all of this craic, and it is not functioning. I would like to hear the thoughts of the witnesses on that.