Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State said it would be off-balance-sheet. I appreciate the role she foresees for voluntary housing associations, as they provide her with a vehicle for building off-balance-sheet, but Members, including those in her party, would say it is a central function of local government to be the housing authority, and local government should be the primary provider of social housing. We all want a return to building and we all want funding to be provided to voluntary housing associations to fulfil their remit, but the centrality of local authorities as housing authorities needs to restated and given effect to, and the only way to do that is for the Department to make the funding available to them to undertake that work.

I will return to section 35, which is addressed in the amendments, and the issues with regard to the housing list and the HAP scheme and the correlation between HAP and RAS. The Minister of State has rejected the attempt by Deputy Ellis and ourselves to place a requirement on local authorities to transition people who have a proven track record in RAS to local authority vacancies when they arise, whether through construction or as casual vacancies. We also wanted to include a provision that the Minister of State instruct local authorities to give people on the proposed new waiting list priority and to give them credit for the time they have been on the current waiting lists - and, presumably, for the time they have been in the RAS or the HAP scheme - when local authority houses become vacant. However, she has refused to accept amendments that would give effect to these provisions. I was told as a child "Live horse, get grass."

We are about the business of legislating. The Minister of State has set out a proposed course of action but the first step she has taken is to provide in primary legislation that 80,000 people should be taken off the housing waiting lists. She is then providing that they can go on to a transfer list, which is not formally provided for in legislation, although she referred to the 2009 Act. However, this legislation, for which she is responsible, states clearly: "The provision of housing assistance under this Part shall be deemed to be an appropriate form of social housing support for a household that is determined by a local authority under the said section." I do not know a local authority that has transferred, or will transfer, somebody out of a house in which he or she is deemed to be appropriately housed. I accept the Minister of State's bona fides in this, but this is right-wing Fine Gael legislation. There must be Labour Party people turning in their graves at the prospect of what she is doing in this legislation, because she is changing something that has been at the heart of national housing policy since we undertook the process of self-government. This will have an enormous social impact, which will, unfortunately, be negative.

It is clear that the Minister of State will not accept our amendments, but I hope our colleagues in the Seanad will be more animated by this issue. Given their connection to councillors around the country, they certainly should be. Where we have failed today and over the past number of weeks to convince the Minister of State of the merits of our arguments, I hope Senators will succeed. Opposition Members have made proposals about best practice and effective management of the housing stock we have and that we will, hopefully, build, and it is disappointing and regrettable that the Minister of State has refused to take our recommendations and advice on board.

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