Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. I will speak on the failure of the rental accommodation scheme and social leasing to provide safeguards for tenants threatened with eviction. The previous speaker referred to houses being sold and the tenants being forced to move out. The real beneficiaries have been the landlords. I have nothing against leasing and rent subsidies as short-term measures but they have been put at the centre of housing policy for this Government and its predecessor. The economics of RAS and social leasing are crazy, and it is clear that investing in social housing is a better option both for the public finances and for those in need of housing. After ten years of leasing schemes, local authorities have not added a single brick to their housing stock. Tenants have to find a new home if they manage to get ten years. In County Laois they are not even getting ten years. A considerable amount of the taxpayers' money has been wasted in paying rent to landlords and, most important, tenants have not enjoyed security of tenure. Waiting lists are too long. If the waiting list in County Laois included everyone who qualified, it would contain approximately 2,000 people but the number is currently in excess of 1,400. Housing provision in the county has collapsed. Two new houses were provided last year, which means County Meath beat us by one house. No new local authority scheme has been built in the past 11 or 12 years. Officials report that people are presenting to them every day as homeless.

There is a problem with vacant houses in local authority housing estates. Speculators and would-be landlords purchases houses which were built by the taxpayer in the first place to rent them out. They subsequently got into trouble, with the result that the houses are abandoned and, in some cases, sold at knock-down prices. Local authorities would like to purchase some of these houses because not only could they provide a home for somebody but also they could deal with dereliction and their use as places for anti-social activity. Renovating the houses would also create jobs.

Embarking on another private sector speculative boom is not the way to address the housing crisis. The private sector can play a key role where there is proven demand but a large part of the solution has to be a new local authority house building programme. In earlier recessions, Governments, including the coalition Government in the 1950s of which the party of the Minister of State, Deputy Coffey, was a member, embarked on major house building programmes. In the 1980s, during another recession, we saw further house building programmes. We need good quality local authority housing, the construction of which could create a stimulus at a time when the economy is, we hope, coming out of recession.

Deputy Lawlor put forward the segregationist view that we should abandon Part V. While Part V has its problems, it is irrelevant beyond the Pale and major cities because houses are not being built. When house construction restarts, we cannot allow developers to buy their way out of providing social housing within estates by offering money or land swaps to the local authority. Furthermore, social housing cannot be shoved into one corner of an estate. I could take the Minister of State to a couple of places in County Laois where developers got away with murder in terms of building lower quality houses for the local authority and shoving them beside each other. In one estate, the fronts of the houses are less than three metres away from the adjoining units and are separated only by a narrow walkway. The sun never shines on the fronts of those houses because they are too close together. That scandalous situation must never be allowed to happen again.

We still have to deal with ghost estates, many of which are where they are not needed. We will have to be imaginative in this regard. There are three ghost estates in the small village of Borris-in-Ossory, County Laois, at various stages of completion. Local authorities must be empowered to acquire such estates, irrespective of whether they are in NAMA or in receivership, through site resolution plans. The current situation constitutes a crisis. We need big initiatives, and the time for action is now.

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