Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We on this side of the House are too often obliged to voice our dissatisfaction with the guillotining of legislation and this Government's underhand parliamentary tactics in pushing through Bills in order to avoid debate or for some other political reason. What is being done in the case of this particular Bill is especially shameful because it is one of the most important legislative measures we have dealt with all year. For it to be pushed through at the last minute and the debate guillotined is outrageous. I may be wasting my voice and time here but I appeal to the media to take cognisance of the significance of the Bill. It might not be very sexy compared with the more sensationalist stuff the media likes to focus on but it is about something of great importance for people in this country, which is the provision of quality housing for those who desperately need it and dealing with associated planning issues. It also touches on a range of other issues which I will refer to presently. It is outrageous that the Bill is to be rammed through without proper consideration.

Of course, this fits into a pattern that is becoming increasingly apparent whereby this Government is seeking to exploit the housing crisis. There is no other way to describe it. It is doing so in order to unleash once again the evils of the Celtic tiger, evils which brought us Priory Hall, the pyrite scandal and unplanned and unregulated development, with all the terrible consequences of these things for the entire economy and for proper planning and development in the key area of housing.

This is about facilitating that. In this Bill, the Government is dancing to the tune of the Construction Industry Federation. There is no doubt about it. It is exploiting the justified demand to increase the supply of social and affordable housing and to deal with the housing and homelessness crisis, not as a means to deal with these problems but to let our developer friends off the hook again. These developers will not provide the social housing we need. They never have before and they will not do it in the future.

The Government talks about supply and says we have to increase supply and incentivise the private sector. That is what this Bill is about: incentivising the private sector, relaxing the planning regulations and so on, to encourage our old friends, the developers, to believe they can make money in the current situation because if we do that, we will deal with the housing crisis. I ask the Minister and anybody else looking at this debate whether increasing the supply, per se, provides social and affordable housing or deals with housing and homelessness problems. It does not at all and this seriously needs to be debated on a national level. We were building 70,000 to 90,000 houses a year, mostly in the private sector, before the crash, in the boom period. Did it improve the housing and homelessness situation? No. The problem got worse during that period. It got even worse after the crash, but it got worse consistently throughout the period of the Celtic tiger. The idea that we can solve the housing and homelessness crisis by upping the supply from the private sector is a total fallacy. It is an ideological fallacy that rationalises the greed and profit-seeking of the private developers, which is what the Government is doing.

It is an automatic impulse for the Government to imagine that in dealing with any problem, we have to facilitate our private developer friends. In doing that, we are now going to sacrifice proper planning and development and proper building standards. That is shameful, given the consequences this had in the past. We do not even fully know the consequences it had. We are going to find out in a few decades, but we have seen elements of it with Priory Hall, with pyrite and with God knows what else that was built during that period because of poor building standards and because the developers were let off the hook. Now the Minister wants the power to prevent local authorities from ensuring we have adequate standards at a local level if those standards go beyond the national standards. Shamefully, I believe the Minister has instructed Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council that some of the measures it agreed in the development plan in terms of ensuring good building standards have to be deleted from the plan. He is riding roughshod over democracy. Those proposals included that 50% of all non-residential development should have green roofs - a very sensible measure, given our aspirations on climate change and all the rest of it - and the passive housing requirement about proper insulation, which helps mitigate climate change, is much better for the health of the people living in these places and will save on heating and all that. Those provisions are almost certainly the ones the Minister has directed the council to delete. They are precisely the measures we need to have a good standard of housing, but instead he wants to delete them in order that developers can build cheap, poor quality stuff to make money out of it. That is what the Government is doing and it is shameful.

I can see what is going on here in that we will have the modular housing, from which some of our private developer friends could make money in the short term, and then, because we do not want to build actual physical, permanent council houses, our private developer friends, the vulture funds and so on will come in with the permanent stuff, which they will then lease to the Government for social housing at huge cost and make a killing off it. It is outrageous.

What should we be doing?The Minister of State will say we need the stuff fast. I will tell him how we will get it fast. It is very simple. Start with what I said earlier this morning: buy up the substantial stock of existing housing in Dublin and elsewhere for the people who need it on an emergency basis. That would be just as cheap but much more permanent and appropriate for the people who are in emergency situations. Provide the rent controls, not the flimsy rent certainty the Government was talking about, and increase rent allowance. Open the books of NAMA to see what it actually has rather than accepting whatever it throws at local authorities, which is undoubtedly mostly the crap stuff it thinks it cannot make money out of. We want to see what it actually has - land, property and so on - in order that we can give it over to those who need it.

How do we fast-track without overriding proper building and planning and development standards? We set up a State construction company in order that we take a year out of the construction process. The Government is saying it takes two years to build houses. One year of that is a result of the outsourcing of the design and construction to private developers through the tendering process. That is taking up a year. We have a breakdown from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. A year of this big delay the Government is talking about is because local authorities cannot do it themselves directly. If we did not have to tender out and if we had the teams, the architect, the construction workers, the equipment and so on in the local authorities, like we used to have, we could deliver the social housing in a year, and not modular homes but quality stuff. That is what we should do. NAMA could be the vehicle for it if its mandate were changed and if it were resourced to construct these houses directly. We could build on the land it has, finish the properties that are not ready, and we could do it much quicker without having to sacrifice building standards, proper planning and development, public consultation and local democracy, which is what this Bill is doing. It is outrageous.

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