Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to take part in this debate. The most serious issue facing the country is the lack of investment in our basic infrastructure, particularly during the past five years. Before that, we under invested in water, transport and the connected issue of housing. They go together, and whatever our approach and solution, it must join the dots regarding how we develop places for people to live which are connected, affordable and which build up communities. I will outline how we in the Green Party think we can build the right type of housing at the right cost using the right model and in the right place. We need to get all those right if we are to provide homes in which people can live and have satisfying lives.

Regarding place, we must be careful not to get into a numbers game regarding how many thousand houses we need to build. The numbers game went wrong in the early 2000s, when we were building 90,000 houses per year, but in the wrong places and without any consideration of a proper national spatial strategy which would have connected the houses to places where people were working, schools and shops, which would have developed what we need, namely, vibrant local communities. In this response to the housing crisis, let us take what is already in train, namely, the development of a national spatial strategy by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, and put it centre stage in any programme for Government as the key first step in any new investment strategy we need to do to rebuild our country and provide a more secure economy and society for our people.

According to the planners, we need to reverse the trend over the past 50 years which has been towards a dispersed population with housing spread all over the country. This is very difficult to service with public and private services, such as electricity and broadband. We need to reverse the trend which saw the depopulation of our city centres and start building up our cities again as part of a proper national spatial strategy, not like the strategy in early 2002 in which we set out our infrastructure investment plan, followed it with a spatial plan which was not connected to it, and ignored the spatial plan with the decentralisation scheme and a free-for-all in planning. We must learn from this mistake.

If we are serious about getting planning right, we must bring life back into our city centres. We must reverse the depopulation of Cork city, which has decreased by 0.5% each year for the past 30 years. We must examine the situation in Limerick, where less than 3% of the population live in the city centre. If we get those cities right, they will be vibrant centres of economic development. People will live close to their work and will not have to travel. Deputy Wallace cited the cost of a house 20 km outside a city in Italy. If we keep building 20 km outside Dublin, we know for certain that those people will have to travel across a gridlocked M50 and it will not work. That is why we need to get housing in the right place to ensure people do not spend their entire lives driving and commuting but start having a better and more efficient quality of life, and a better environmental outcome will come with it.

We also need to get the type of housing we build right. The Minister's change of the standards, reversing a move to try to build proper housing in which families could live, was a retrograde step. In my local area, Clonskeagh, planning had been granted for a development on the Smurfit Paper Mills site. It was ready to go, but suddenly last month a new site notice was put up. Thanks to the Minister's weakening of the regulations, the developers are seeking new planning permission that would include an extra ten apartments and 27 car parking spaces. This type of place does not need the lower quality, box apartments. It needs high quality apartments in which people can live and raise families. By weakening the regulations, the Minister has reversed us to the poor legacy of previous Administrations which saw housing as all about making profits for developers rather than creating homes for people. We need to change this.

I also regret that the Minister is weakening the energy standards. We need to build carbon neutral houses with zero energy costs.

That is possible, but not if we step back and start weakening regulations. That would be a fundamental mistake. While it might lead to a short-term gain in terms of decreasing the developer's immediate costs, the people who live in the apartment or the house for the next 20 or 30 years will curse the Minister forever and a day because they will have to pay more than they would have needed to pay if we had stuck to proper building standards.

I do not believe it is impossible for us to make sure buildings are provided at the right cost. I cite as an example a passive house that was built recently in Enniscorthy, County Wexford. This standard three-bedroom house of 1,100 sq. ft. is retailing at €170,000 at a zero energy cost for the house. Each year, the person who buys it will save money that would otherwise have been wasted on energy spending. An edition of a surveyor's magazine that was published recently showed how it is possible for us to build buildings inexpensively. I am sure every Deputy received a copy of it in his or her mailbox yesterday, just as I did. It shows how a typical semi-detached house of 1,200 sq. ft can be built for something like €250,000. To my mind, it is not impossible for us to build in a way that will be affordable for our people. If that is to happen, we need to provide the volume and the low-cost financing and get the planning, the model and the financing structure right.

I believe the fundamental mistake that was made in this regard by the outgoing Government was informed by an ideological position within the heart of the system. I am not the only person who thinks the Department of Finance did not believe in capital expenditure and cut it excessively. One of the IMF's main criticisms of the outgoing Government related to its excessive desire to cut capital expenditure.

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