Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I had not planned on speaking but this is a very interesting subject, so I thought I would. The general thrust of what Deputy Cowen said was positive. We need to be proactive about the problems in towns. The problems in the average town and those in Dublin city are very different. Sorting out Dublin city is a more long-term project. If one goes into the city at night, which I do, there is an air of aggression and it is not as comfortable as it should be. Sorting that out will not happen over night. The root causes of it are linked to serious social deprivation in the city. There is probably a poverty rate in the region of 20%, which is high by European standards. There is also a major drug problem. It was interesting to read Fr. Peter McVerry's thoughts on it. I would be very much in agreement with his stance on it that we need to take a different approach. What we have been doing has not worked so we need to look at doing something different. Fr. Peter McVerry knows more about it than any of us, so we should listen to him.

I refer to the commercial element of city and town centres. Over the past 20 years, there has been a lot of in-fill development in Dublin. I was involved in a lot of it where we put commercial space on the ground floor and residential space overhead. It was positive, a good idea and it worked well. Where we fell down was that we did not put the social element in the city centre area because it was not policy. The builder or developer did not want to do that either because there was not the same kind of money involved. Under the Part V arrangement developers were eventually forced to give 20% of a project if it was more than 800 sq. m towards social development but, unfortunately, the developer was allowed to park it somewhere else in the region, which was a bad idea and should not have been tolerated. It would have been good socially and for society in general if we had put a minimum of 20% social development everywhere.

Unfortunately, there is not a serious appetite in this Government for social housing, nor was there in the previous one. It is not on the agenda and that needs to change. We need to develop a different approach. It will be positive if we get back to direct social housing provision by the State.

One of the biggest problems in towns - I know Wexford town best - is that people do not believe they have a say in how their community is organised. I like to compare this to places which work better in this area. I know the village of Cortemelia in Piedmont, which has a population of 3,000, very well. The people there have a very big say in how things are done and there is huge civic involvement in the goings on in the village. When they elect people to the local authority, those people are put into positions with decision-making powers. It is not only public servants who make decisions in the local comune but the people who are elected take major responsibility for most of the decisions made at local level. This is a very good idea because it means that those who are elected organise their local authority. One does not see any empty shops in the village even though the people do not have a lot of money. Generally speaking, Italians have less money in their pockets than the Irish but they have a better way and a better quality of life. Social services are very good and people do not mind paying their house tax, water charge and refuse collection charge because they get a very good return for their investment. It works both ways. Rates and rents are much lower than here.

The Minister of State mentioned that many of the local authorities managed to bring down rates, or at least keep them the same, in 2012. As I mentioned previously in the House, I have five wine bars and a coffee shop. We are looking at a rate increase in Dublin of more than 45% on the basis of the new adjustment, which is shocking. I do not understand the logic behind it; it makes no sense. We are in a position where rates are 25% of our rent, which is not sustainable. However, shops are not everything. If we are going to make our small towns healthy again, there will have to be stronger civic engagement but I do know how we will do that.

The Garda Síochána played a very positive role in my local community when I was younger. The closure of Garda stations is not a good idea. This idea of the garda passing through a village in a white van and disappearing again is not the same as what we had in the past where everybody knew the garda and the garda knew everybody. There was a positive relationship between the garda and the community. That is something we should hold on to rather than move away from.

A huge problem in towns is that large supermarkets have taken much of the life out of town centres. There must be active support for shops in town centres at the expense of the larger shops on the outskirts of towns.

Bigger is not always better but the trend in the past 20 years, not just in Ireland but in much of the developed world, has been that the bigger the unit the more favourably it is treated and, sadly, the smaller the unit the more difficult it is to make ends meet. The opposite should be the case. We must actively engage with and directly help the smaller unit to survive, which can be done in different ways, and not allow the bigger element swallow the smaller one, so to speak.

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