Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

In some ways, today was pretty much like any other. Among those who contacted my office was a young family with two children. The male partner is suffering from ill health and had been renting accommodation, but they must now move out because the landlord is selling the property. They put a deposit on another property which was accepted, but the landlord did not want to have anything to do with people on rent allowance so he decided not to go ahead. That occurred at the end of May and subsequently they have become homeless with nothing on the horizon for them to go to.

Another mother was in touch with me. She has been on the priority four-bedroom housing list in Fingal County Council for eight or nine years. She is now at position No. 10, but she might as well be at No. 10,000 for a four-bedroom house because being on a priority list does not get you anything. Three of her five children have problems, including serious special needs.

Similarly, another woman who needs four-bedroom accommodation has been on a list for nine years but there is not a chance in hell of getting accommodated anywhere. Deputies who have highlighted the fact that we are experiencing an utter housing crisis are absolutely correct. Against that background, however, what we are being presented with here is nothing. It is not even a drop in the ocean, although I am not saying that to score a cheap political point. The reality is that the measures in this Bill will have zero impact on dealing with the housing issue.

We have discussed changes to Part V and the vacant site levy, but there are so many loopholes in them that they will be meaningless in delivering what they are supposed to deliver. They are supposed to incentivise private developers to give up sites for building, while on the other hand we are supposed to get houses delivered as part of the private schemes that have gone on. Having been a councillor for 13 years in an area which was massively developing and had a huge amount of rezoning in the boom years, we saw every trick in the book concerning Part V. It is good that developers cannot offer money instead, but this is not a guarantee of integrated development because there are too many loopholes there. Whatever is reasonable can be open to any scrutiny, which means it is not reasonable.

We had a scenario in Fingal where a certain big developer had been developing both in Malahide and Balbriggan. He did not want to put social housing in Malahide, which is a much more affluent area, but it suited him to put it in Balbriggan. From the local authority's point of view, it was better to get more units in Balbriggan than ten or 20 units in Malahide.

The local authority was getting 150 units in Balbriggan. Given the pressure it was under to accommodate those on its lists, it seemed like an attractive proposition for it to agree. In fact, it did go for that option to accommodate more people, but it has resulted precisely in the non-integrated development that should not be desirable. I put it to the Minister of State that there is nothing in the Bill to stop that from happening again, despite the intentions. In fact, all it proposes to do is reduce the requirement from 20% to 10% without any guarantee that it can actually deliver on what it is seeking to achieve.

One point highlighted by other Deputies is key. This scenario is a serious indictment of neoliberal capitalism. In the 1940s and 1950s representatives of the State went to building sites in London and dropped leaflets among the Irish community appealing to them to come back and take part in housebuilding programmes in the State. That was at a time when we had far fewer resources as a society than we do now. Now, we cannot access money on the books for local authorities to build houses, yet the European Central Bank can give money at rate of 1% to banks to lend money among themselves, but they cannot lend money to put a roof over people's heads. My God, that is certainly wrong-way-around economics in anyone's book.

Our starting point should be the right of people to have a home. We should then put in place mechanisms to deliver on this. The reality is that we cannot rely on the private sector to deliver. There should, therefore, be a range of options. The Government has referred to the promised €3.5 billion programme for social housing and so on. If that funding was used to build social housing, it might be something, but it is not being used for that purpose at all. It is to be used for leasing and private rental arrangements and all of the complexities that these entail. It is simply not going to meet the need.

We have completely and utterly let the National Asset Management Agency off the hook in terms of its supposed role in delivering social and affordable housing. I offer one example from my constituency. A number of individuals contacted me. They said it was very difficult for young people in the Malahide area to find property because of rising prices. They are the children of people living in the area. They gave the example of a recent development of 40 apartments between Swords and Malahide which was sold for €1.4 million to a developer from the North. That works out at approximately €35,000 per apartment and the development needed some completion work. Let us be generous and say the cost of the completion work amounted to approximately a further €60,000 per unit. That would result in a finished product at a cost price of €95,000. One of the people who contacted me said that through the network of the community he knew well in excess of 40 local couples in the area were struggling to be passed for a mortgage of more than €220,000. Therefore, instead of NAMA getting €1.4 million, it could have received €2.4 million if the people concerned had collectively come together to bid for the property. Instead of the property going to an investor who is going to hive it off or rent it for a killing, we could have ensured local people secured local homes at an affordable price and the State would have received more money than it ended up with on this deal. It is an absolute joke.

The people to whom I spoke made a point about other properties in the area which had been sold, including on Streamstown Lane in Malahide. The sites were not advertised and no one knew how to access them. There was no information on the old Grove Hotel the old rugby club. People were looking for information on them also and I contacted NAMA on their behalf. I was given the details and told that the residents could contact the receiver. I duly passed on the information, as NAMA had requested. The receiver absolutely chewed the face off the resident who rang, asking how she had got his name and number, since the property in question was not on the market. That is the type of thing going on. Meanwhile, we have people who are desperately in need of a home. The deal was supposed to be that NAMA would be part of the solution in dealing with community need in terms of housing. We are failing miserably in that regard.

Reference has been made to the vacant site issue. One matter we have not tackled is developers buying unzoned land and sitting on it. This is excluded from the provisions of the Bill. There have been some interesting articles recently on the hoarding of agricultural land. An annual survey by the Irish Farmers Journalfound that the average price of land in County Dublin had surged by 50% to €23,500 per acre in 2014. Irish agricultural land is the dearest in Europe. The report editor of The Irish Times, Lorcan Allen, made the point that vast prices were being paid for agricultural land on the outskirts of towns and villages with future development potential. He highlighted how one tillage farm in County Dublin had been valued by an auctioneer at €20,000 per acre and ended up selling at €50,000 per acre. We are not doing anything about this. This goes back to the Kenny report and the absolute necessity for the State to control the price of building land. We need to have a certain percentage figure higher than the agricultural value. It should be leased back and given to developers to develop housing linked with a definite sale price. Cutting out speculation in land prices is critical. Many Deputies have spent time as members of local authorities and know how the system works. People are in the know and know what development land is likely to come up for sale. They buy it at agricultural prices and can sit it out or make an approach and try to put forward an argument in favour of why their land should be developed. The reality is that because of the wholesale rezonings that took place during the boom years we have a vast amount of surplus rezoned land.

We need more than tinkering at the edges, but that is all that the Bill amounts to. If it was tinkering at the edges, we might take the view that it was not too bad, but it is actually worse because it is actually reducing some of the restrictions in place. It will not deliver one single extra unit onto the market. We need to do far more and think far more radically than anything proposed in the Bill.

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