Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will continue with the same theme. It takes Dublin City Council the best part of 20 years to CPO a property. That is my bitter experience with it. I commend the other local authorities. I appreciate Dublin City Council has a much more complex and challenging job in terms of size, scale, and all of that, but it also has very significant resources. If it needs more resources, then we need to provide them because there is no part of the country where there is a greater economic or social need for housing. We are not getting new-build homes in Dublin city. There have not been any new-build homes built in Dublin city in ten years. If we do not start very rapidly using the built infrastructure that is already there, whatever crisis we already have will just get worse. It has a massive impact economically and socially. We have schools that cannot recruit teachers. We have hospitals that cannot recruit nurses and doctors. For all of the right reasons, we are making massive investment in social infrastructure in the city and housing is not being delivered. The social housing programme is going very strong, but no new private homes are being built in the city, and there have not been any built for ten years. We can talk about the derelict sites list, CPOs, and all of these issues but, to be honest, we do not need to gather any more data. I appreciate it is a really important task and we have to do that nationally, but we need an approach for Dublin city. We actually need to recognise that Dublin city has national importance. I am not saying this because I am from Dublin city. This is having a social and economic impact way beyond my immediate constituency or community.

I hear what Mr. Kehoe is saying. To be fair to Dublin City Council; it is really good. To be fair to the Department; it has provided unprecedented funding in the last couple of years for urban regeneration and the public domain. We will see an awful lot more of it, but in the meantime there are all of these vacant properties. Mountjoy Square is the finest, most perfect Georgian square in the country, yet there is an amount of vacancy on that square. It is not just in the last couple of weeks, that is the case for months and years. That is also the case right across the city. In terms of the application of this at the street level, it is fine if have got small units, but what we need is an adaptation of vacant commercial spaces at scale. It has been done in Dublin before. Croke Park is probably someplace that the witnesses visit. There is an old distillery building on Jones' Road. In Shandon in Phibsboro there is the old Shandon mills. To be fair, Tuath did a great job out in Park West, which was again funded by the Department, so it can be done. In Brooklyn, in New York city, DUMBO was a zone just under the Brooklyn Bridge. The name is an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Over a period of 20 years they took what was an area completely filled with warehouses and it is now among the most expensive residential areas in all of the United States. I do not suggest we need that, but my ambition and vision would be for us to take the vacant commercial units that are at scale. I refer to the older office blocks that will need to be brought up to a higher standard. That would be a really good use of State and public fund investment for the affordable and cost rental area. It would meet a social and economic need in the city but it would also do it in a way that is sustainable from the perspective of the public purse. If they are long-term affordable cost rental they will remain available into the future and they will meet the needs of the key workers: the teachers, the nurses, the gardaí, the artists, the entrepreneurs - people who are earning just above the social housing income limit.

My ask is to urge the Department and the CCMA to work with Dublin City Council to put together an accelerated plan for the city. There is much great work going on, but I think the stats Ms Timmons gave earlier about the 1,500 applications for the vacant property grant kind of says it all. That is a huge number of applications within a very short period of time.

I fully understand why the Department cannot yet report on the completions, because each property is individual. Each property will take an amount of time, and the grant is only paid when the work is done. If it was easy, it would have been done overnight. I am absolutely confident that as the reports come out on a quarterly basis, the numbers are going to be strong and they are going to continue to grow. I am fairly certain the local authorities and the Department will exhaust that fund. It is great, but in the city we need it at a bigger scale. The grants for vacant and derelict properties can be used - I know the Department adjusted the scheme to allow for the inclusion of a second property if it is for rental purposes – but what we actually need is a similar type of intervention to what we do to provide affordable housing in the city, namely, a subvention to allow for affordable cost rental to be delivered through the adaptation and reuse of the vacant commercial spaces. The rate of vacant commercial space in the city is about 15%, so there are a lot of properties there. It should specifically be for affordable housing, ideally affordable cost rental and affordable purchase.

I ask the CCMA and the Department to work together to try to bring forward an accelerated plan for the city. We desperately need it.