Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on an issue that affects all constituencies. It is not just an urban issue, but affects every town and village in the country. People want to hear about possible solutions as well as a plan for the future.

I have mentioned something in the House on a number of occasions and I urge the Minister to examine it. In the city of Dublin, within walking distance of this Chamber, there is a university with approximately 16,500 students. I do not have a copy of the register of electors for Nassau Street, Molesworth Street, Kildare Street, Grafton Street and O'Connell Street, but I presume very few people live in those streets now compared to the number that lived there 40 or 50 years ago. If we have building stock in urban, town and village areas that is vacant, is there something we can do to incentivise the people who own these properties to put them to use for people who need to be housed? Of course, there is. As I have said previously, it can be done through an examination of the system of commercial rates and the incentivisation of people to upgrade their existing facilities and convert them into units in which people could be housed comfortably and safely in a modern facility.

There is no need to go 15 and 20 miles from the heart of a large urban centre such as Dublin, Limerick, Cork or Galway to try and solve this problem. Around the world large urban centres such as Amsterdam and Paris are living cities. We have cities in which nobody lives. There are thousands of empty units throughout Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway, but no plan to address that. At the same time, Dublin City Council, for example, is reducing the local property tax by 15%, costing approximately €11 million. That €11 million will be taken directly out of services. South Dublin County Council will take out €5 million. One could house a large number of people with those amounts. The Government will take its share of responsibility but county and city councils throughout the country do not have Part 8 provisions ready, do not have sites ready, have not sought planning permission and have no idea where they would put houses if they won the lotto, for want of a better word, and received all of the money they required tomorrow morning. They have no plans in place. The reason is, as Deputy Durkan said, that this problem has been sat on for a generation.

The Minister and other Deputies will be aware that not a single rural house has been built by local authorities for probably more than a decade.

It is said there is no housing problem outside the 50 km/h speed limit zones in parts of this country, which, of course, is not the case. There are sons and daughters of farmers in smallholdings in the west and south who simply cannot afford to build a house. As Deputy Durkan said, they bring a site to the table. In previous years, the local authority would have financed the construction of a house but those people are now on the same housing list as tens of thousands of others because they cannot access loans because the conditions attaching are so onerous.

There are things that can be done, although I am not for one minute saying there is a panacea. There are problems in regard to housing repairs for elderly people and the situation relating to voids is scandalous. No wonder this is the case if there is a city council that can take €11 million from its budget because it says it does not need it while at the same time it has hundreds - if not thousands - of units that need to be upgraded in order to be let. There is a question of morality. If a local authority such as Dublin City Council can afford to take €11 million from its budget while having thousands of people on its housing waiting lists, then the councillors who voted for this need to take a look at themselves and ask if this is the appropriate use of resources. I do not believe it is. They should have taken that €11 million and, within four weeks, tried to find how many of those void units could house families.

We have all experienced this issue as public representatives. A huge number of people are offered local authority houses and refuse them. They have no choice but to the refuse them because, in many cases, the houses are in areas that are blighted by antisocial behaviour. Local authorities and the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government have failed tenants in those local authority housing estates for years by not looking after them. If we are going to have a discussion in regard to local authority housing and social housing, we need to include the existing tenants who, in many cases, have been abandoned by local authorities and the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government.

As Deputy Durkan said, what we need is a long-term plan. We do not need falsities and pipedreams. We need a short-term programme in the context of modular housing and emergency accommodation. However, as Deputy McDonald will know, NAMA offered 5,753 properties to local authorities and only 1,068 of them were taken up, which shows there is a deep-rooted problem in local authorities when it comes to the housing crisis. It is not just the Government.

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