Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

This motion addresses important and interesting issues. Much of the responsibility in the five PPPs in question lies with the local authority, Dublin City Council. It is worthwhile to have a fairly robust critique of the council's role in the provision of housing. In the past, it relied too much on developers to pick up the tab for the physical, economic and social regeneration of areas. In the 11 years I spent as a Dublin city councillor, I was critical of the role it played in, for instance, the regeneration of the Iveagh Markets. The council paid off the remaining tenants in the building and waited for a single developer to proceed with development. Ten years after those plans were announced, the Iveagh Markets still lie abandoned and derelict. It is a shameful neglect of the heart of Dublin's Liberties, an area I represented as a councillor. History repeats itself. In this case, Dublin City Council was over-reliant on a particular developer to pick up the pieces in areas that did not receive the attention they deserved.

The recently retired Comptroller and Auditor General, Mr. John Purcell, stated in his parting remarks that public private partnerships should not be seen as a panacea to all our ills. Those words ring true in this instance. I have always had a certain nervousness about PPPs and believe we should not rely on them.

In estates such as O'Devaney Gardens and St. Michael's, the State and the local authority wanted to overcome the historic problem whereby housing was provided either as private housing or local authority housing. This has created a housing apartheid within the State, whereby one is tagged as a private resident or a local authority tenant. This is a large obstacle that needs to be overcome. This process has begun to a certain extent. Considerable investment has been made in housing co-operatives, housing associations, the voluntary housing sector and in the role of the traditional housing trusts such as the Iveagh Trust and the St. Pancras Housing Association. These, along with other voluntary and charitable bodies, are providing a much broader range of housing in different areas.

There is the residual issue, however, of relying on the private sector or the local authority to provide the bulk of housing in the State. We must move beyond this and broaden the middle ground. Many of these regeneration projects attempted to do that. If there is a problem with them, it is that they relied unduly on the private sector to do all the donkey work in making the regeneration happen. The alternative is for the local authority to play a strong role in master-planning the area. It should parcel out much smaller portions of the redevelopment to the private sector and to voluntary housing bodies while carrying out works directly itself in providing housing and community facilities.

The problem of putting all eggs in the one basket has been repeated many times this evening. This is what happened with these five regeneration projects. To depend on a particular developer to carry out the bulk of regeneration projects in the city is a dangerous road to go down. I have had my run-ins with Bernard McNamara to stop him parking his helicopter beside a protected area on the shores of Dublin Bay. Bernard McNamara is in there to make a buck; if he cannot make a buck, he leaves. This is the essence of the difficulty faced in this instance.

We must move on from the immediate categorisation of people by the housing in which they live. The State needs to provide housing benefit directly to the beneficiary to avail of housing through a local authority, the voluntary housing sector or private housing.

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