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

This is relevant to the amendment because we were talking about housing. The delegates said that the pleas of the developers, claiming it is currently not viable to build housing anywhere in Ireland, are false. The delegates said building houses is viable but the reason the developers are not building is the profit to be made is not enough for them. In other words, the reason is greed. The implication - in fact, it was pretty explicitly stated by Frank Daly - was that the developers are essentially holding the Government hostage in order to batter down standards so they can make an even bigger profit. The Government has handed them the ammunition to do this by selling, via NAMA, vast amounts of property to vulture funds. These vulture funds are now effectively holding the Government hostage in terms of housing. This is happening to such an extent that they are now putting pressure on the Government to dilute housing standards.

Frank Daly informed me that the vast majority of the existing 15,000 units NAMA took over and the development potential for 70,000 units - which is a huge number - has already been, or will be, transferred to these vulture funds. Even then, they are still not happy. They are so flipping greedy, they want to be able to build box apartments that are rubbish and are pressurising the Government to override standards.

I have had some indication of what this is likely to mean in my area of Dún Laoghaire. One of the things mentioned in Deputies Daly's and Wallace's minimum standards concerns Ireland's emissions and climate obligations. They are trying to ensure that we shall pay attention to these things when drawing up guidelines.

How eminently sensible is that? In the last week or two, however, the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government has contacted Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and told it that the requirement for passive housing building standards, that is, good insulation which will be good for the occupants and also help us to meet our carbon emissions targets, must be deleted from the development plan because the developers do not like it. It would cost them too much and they cannot make enough profit that way. In the same week that the Government is trumpeting its commitment to dealing with climate change and the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy White is producing his white paper and declaring our commitment to the targets, it is also telling a local authority not to include passive home requirements in the building standards for houses that will be built in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. That is what we are getting in reality. All of the aspirations, whether on climate change or building standards, are sacrificed as the Government dances to the tune of the developers who got us into this mess.

These amendments are a second line defence against what this Bill proposes and I support them for that reason. However, the best protection we have in terms of building standards is democracy, to underline the point made by Deputy Ó Snodaigh. What do I mean by that? Who is better placed to decide what sort of standards should apply to the houses we build than the people who will live in them? That is how one has good planning, development and building standards. I know of some examples of this, one being the redevelopment of York Street in Dublin city centre. In that case, progressive architects working for Dublin City Council worked with the residents in developing the plans for York Street. They worked together on every single detail of the apartments, the play areas and the green areas and agreed balcony sizes, ceiling heights on so forth. All of these aspects were discussed with the residents over a period of time so that they had a proper input into how the places they would live in and raise their families would look. That is how one does good planning. One certainly does not let the developers decide because they are only worried about how much profit they can make. Furthermore, one does not let central Government, no matter how enlightened it might think it is, make these decisions either. One puts democracy at the heart of the process. Giving the Government power to override the little bit of democracy that we have is the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be enhancing and expanding democracy at the local level to ensure that we have the highest possible standards.

I wish to give another example of the cynicism and greed of developers in the context of building standards. There is a development in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown which is half finished. The Part V requirement was originally 20% but in the second phase of this development that will probably be reduced to 10%, although that is still unclear. Those units will be leased back to the council, of course. To discharge their obligation to provide 20% social housing, the developers, with the agreement of NAMA, put all of the social housing units in a north facing corner of the site. The units were of a completely different quality and standard to those built on the rest of the site which were for sale on the private market. They produced yellow pack housing for people on the social housing waiting list. Will the Minister of State, in the context of the reduced the Part V requirement, guarantee that the 10% will not be hived off into the worst corner of development sites with lesser building standards than those applied to the other 90%? Will the social housing units be genuinely mixed in to ensure the social mix which the Government claims to support? Will the 10% be of the same quality as the other 90%? To date, that has not been the experience. Developers seek the cheapest way to discharge their commitment to provide social housing, which they really do not want to do because all they are interested in is money.

The fundamental problem here is that this Bill is driven by the belief that in order to deliver the housing we need, we must to dance to-----

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