Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this technical Bill. Housing, and public housing in particular, has been of concern to me for some time and was one of the core reasons for my entry into public life 14 years ago. Having a place to call home involves much more than bricks and mortar. It involves building communities. We spend so much money each year bailing out private landlords from the taxpayer's purse and entering into long-term lease arrangements, whereby the tenant will never end up owning his or her home but the taxpayer will pay the rent for 20 years, that it is becoming unacceptable. To institutionalise this approach in the absence of comprehensive local authority house-building programmes is a step that we need to reconsider. It is not sustainable and represents in the long term bad value for the taxpayer's money and probably a bad direction for society and the citizens who depend on public housing. We should not seriously consider institutionalising what should be a short-term solution to a situation in which people find themselves.

In recent years the State has removed itself from the business of constructing local authority houses. The policy was initiated by the recent Fianna Fáil-led Governments and it has been continued out of necessity because of our economic situation. We should develop a new local authority house-building programme, for several reasons. So many people on local authority housing lists depend on rent subsidy and State supports that it would be better for society and for those citizens to have a house they can call their own and a community in which they can plan and develop their lives.

One of the major contributing factors to the unemployment problem is the fact that tens of thousands of construction workers lost their jobs between 2008 and 2011. We need to find a way for the State to invest in getting those skilled tradesmen and construction workers back to work. There is no better way to do that than by developing a series of local authority direct house-building schemes in the next few years. It is a question of building communities and not just houses. The Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy O'Dowd, and I are very familiar with the various estates we represent in County Louth - in Dundalk, Ardee, Drogheda and so on - where there were progressive house-building programmes since the 1930s but where there has been a lacuna in recent years. Those communities are the best one could hope for. They have produced some of the best families, some of the best citizens.

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