Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will take this opportunity to congratulate the Ceann Comhairle on his election to that particular office. I have no doubt that he will do the job in a way that will be exemplary and I look forward to working with him.

The housing situation is exactly as has been described on all sides of the House. The problem is that everybody seems to be able to attribute it to a particular issue. I want to point out one thing: this issue did not arise in the past five years. It did not even arise in the past ten years. The housing situation we now face in this country has its origins about 19 years ago, when the Government of the day decided to shift the responsibility from the local authorities and hand it over to the private rental sector to provide housing for the people who would ordinarily be on the local authority housing list. It was deemed to be a great idea. At the same time, the notion was fed into the public arena that really Irish people should not be so preoccupied with home ownership, that we should be more continental in our approach and that the way of the future was to rent a property instead of the conventional way of building local authority houses and offering loans to people who could buy their own houses.

As the Ceann Comhairle knows, in County Kildare we have approximately 6,500 people on the list. It must be more than that, actually, because there were 6,500 people on the list five years ago. I cannot understand how they have remained that way ever since and I know they have not. We have gone away completely from the conventional methods that were proven to be helpful in dealing with the housing situation. The local authority loans are long since gone. When a person who was on a local authority housing list was eligible or below a certain income level, they could apply for a local authority loan. Young civil servants, teachers, nurses and gardaí always got local authority loans. Where are they gone now? They are finished; there are no loans available. The formula used to be two and a half times a person's income, as the Ceann Comhairle might remember.

When the shift took place 20 years ago, property prices went mad, to such an extent that nobody could buy a house anymore except by borrowing multiples of what they would be entitled to on the basis of previous criteria. It was a sad thing and it did irreparable damage. It hugely increased the price of property and created a situation where people had to pay up to 50% of their available income to pay their mortgage. That is crazy stuff. That is how we have arrived at the situation we are in now, where banks and lending agencies are moving on people. It is utterly ridiculous. The Ceann Comhairle and I have seen situations where people were awarded loans that we would not have granted them under any circumstances. It was just ridiculous. All of these people are now being forced onto the housing list; the local authority is no longer building and has not done so for a number of years.

Incidentally, I and everybody else in this House who was in the business at the time managed to rescue people who were homeless right in the middle of the boom. There were so many houses around at the time that it was possible to rejig the situation and help them out, but there plenty of people were homeless at that time and the situation has got much worse. I would agree entirely with those who say we need to focus on the housing issue in a more serious way than we have done. Remember, the money has been provided; almost €4 billion has been provided by the last Government. It is already in place and is there for drawing down by the local authorities, but it is not possible to do it in the time in which we would like to see it done.

Some kind of an emergency must be declared in order to try to introduce legislation that will bring about a rapid improvement of the situation within three to six months. If that does not happen, I can say from my experience of this business that we will see a further escalation in the homelessness situation. It does not matter what Government is in power – unless something is done to focus on that particular issue in the shortest possible time, the situation will get immeasurably worse. When it does, all of politics, and all colours and shades in this House, will suffer. For my tuppence worth in this situation, I would strongly urge that whoever is in government would recognise the need to focus immediately on introducing emergency legislation. This has been done in other countries and it was done after the Second World War. It had to be done in an emergency situation. It can be done now, it just requires us to take the matter by the scruff of the neck and introduce the necessary legislation.

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