Ms Eilish Comerford:

On behalf of the St. Michael’s Estate regeneration team from Inchicore in Dublin 8, I thank the joint committee for giving me this opportunity to address members.

St. Michael’s Estate tegeneration team was set up in 2001. Its membership comprises local residents, local community projects, volunteers and a worker from the canal communities local drugs and alcohol task force. St. Michael’s Estate was a local authority flat complex located in Inchicore in the Dublin South Central constituency. There were 346 local authority homes on the site which was designated for regeneration in 1998. To date, only two phases have been completed, with 175 new replacement homes being built as part of two separate schemes on adjacent sites. Currently, it is a 10 acre site ready for development. Since 2002 there have been three proposed plans for the estate, the first of which was to have been publicly funded, but it was rejected by the then Department of Environment in 2004. A city council driven plan, which provided for a large density, followed it, but it was rejected in 2005 by the local community and all 52 city councillors. It was followed a public private partnership, PPP, model which was foisted on the community and collapsed spectacularly in 2008. Following the collapse of the PPP model, the community gathered and fought and secured funds to develop a scheme of 75 state-of-the art-homes, the Thornton Heights housing scheme, which was completed in 2014. We believe the current Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government and Dublin City Council’s proposed plan under the housing lands initiative is a give-away to private developers. The developer will gain the maximum benefit from that type of development and we oppose this model. Instead we are proposing that a cost rental model be used to provide the housing and facilities. St. Michael's Estate can be a pilot scheme for a radical and workable solution to the housing issues plaguing Ireland.

Our arguments in favour of a cost rental model for St. Michael’s Estate are based on three principles, namely, meeting housing need, reducing housing costs, providing real affordable housing and the promotion of long-term housing and community sustainability. The land in St. Michael's Estate is publicly owned and ought to remain in public ownership and be used for the public good. A cost rental model would create the conditions to have a real mix of income and household types which would create more sustainable communities. Local people could live in affordable rental accommodation in their own areas. It would also allow people to live near the city, as is the case in Vienna. It would relieve the pressure and burden experienced by those stuck in the unregulated private rental sector and offer another option other than taking out a life-long mortgage which subjects people to life-long debt. As the experts have told the meeting, it would pay for itself over time, would be crash-proof and take housing out of the hands of vulture funds. A cost rental model has been discussed in Government policy documents, including A Programme for a Partnership Government, Rebuilding Ireland and Social Housing 2020.

What we want for St. Michael’s Estate is a publicly funded development to be built on this public land such that 300 homes would be built as part of a pilot cost rental model on the site. Community facilities and amenities should be budgeted for and built as part of the development. If we want communities to work, it makes sense to build them first to enable the people of Inchicore to have a benefit from the scheme from the very beginning. The tenure mix should be 150 households which would come from the social housing waiting list and that would pay differential rent, as they do now. The other 150 households would qualify from a new list created for those with incomes above the current threshold for social housing. The overall cost would be between €55 and €60 million. We are asking the committee to advocate that this funding be ringfenced in the budget. The financial outlay on the scheme would be recouped over a period of 30 to 40 years on the basis of rental revenue received from tenants.

As legislators and policy makers, we urge members to seek workable and imaginative solutions to the housing crisis. St. Michael’s Estate offers such a unique opportunity to begin a process of radical change in housing provision in Ireland.