Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the report and wish the Minister well. I wish Deputy Bailey well as Chairman of the Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government, which I look forward to working and engaging with. I pay tribute to Deputy Harty and others who worked on the interim committee. I know the work that Deputy Harty put in and he has provided very interesting statistics on foot of his professional experience. I will talk more generally and about the delivery.

I wish the Minister well. He is more down to earth and realistic in what he has to do. We had a previous Minister who announced something every day. I am talking about Deputy Kelly. The houses would not fit in Ireland if he had built them all. Blunder, bluff and bluster was all we got from him. He would turn sods and design maps but really he did absolutely nothing. We hear the Labour Party lecturing and telling us what we could do and the Deputies on the left that know everything about building, developers and bankers, but there are very few of them involved in voluntary housing associations or in other aspects of housing. They should do something rather than telling us all how to do it.

We have a serious housing crisis. We know that. I have spoken to the Minister before on this. I hope he gets involved and gets down and dirty because there are blockages. I agree with Deputy Wallace. I do not agree with him a lot of the time. Tá sé imithe anois. I do not know if he was a developer or a builder or a bit of both. That is his business but some people are confused. He knows the difference between a developer and a builder. We cannot denigrate and demonise every builder in the country. They were the backbone of the economy and they provided great employment. I am glad that the Seanad agreed a motion earlier tonight to give self-employed people some benefit from PRSI. They are a decent race of people. They are not aliens, they do not have horns and they are not monsters. They are genuine people. I have worked for many of them and I saw the results. They want to build and have the capacity to build small schemes of houses and one-off homes for people who want to house themselves if they can get a mortgage.

There are a lot of blockages in the system. I agree that NAMA is a vehicle. I said it in this House - from this very seat - on the night NAMA was set up that it was like a wild animal being released in the woods and nobody knew where it would end up. We do not know now if it is in Austria or Syria or where it is but we know it is a mess. It is unaccountable and it is not delivering. I see there are aspirations regarding how many houses it will build and deliver. We have had that before. It failed and it is not accountable. The sooner it is disbanded and the animal is reined in or lassoed and brought down to Puck Fair in Killorglin - he need not be put up at a height, just put him up in pictures - the better, because there will be inquiries and investigations into NAMA in decades or years to come.

There are blockages in respect of planning. I do not know what has happened to our county councils. They have suffered cutbacks in funding and staff and they have also lost their way and their will to build houses.

The Census has referred to the number of vacant houses. Local authorities have a lot of them. They are boarded up, in some cases for years. They tell us that they cannot get funding or approval from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government and the Department tells us something else. There should not be such blockages.

Planning is also an issue. There are young couples in my area who want to build houses. I have told the Minister, Deputy Coveney, this previously and I want him to come and see the area. Lately, I heard from three such couples who had done everything - they got the design, engineers and everything else. Willing to house themselves, they paid a lot of money. The planning rules are so restrictive. There are fiddly issues stopping them and delaying them. On the other hand, there is lovely zoned land in the town of Cahir and elsewhere which should be developed. We cannot build any house because there is no access and the planners are afraid to give permission for any more than two or three houses. As I said, people want to buy houses for different reasons.

Vulture funds are buying up the houses that borrowers have been evicted from. There is no coherent message in the plan for those in mortgage distress, and to stop the banks evicting borrowers. I thought there would be. There is a mention but nothing cohesive. We must stop that because we will never deal with the housing crisis if we do not stop mortgage holders being made homeless on a daily basis by the banks. A whole army has built up around this, with sheriffs, repossession agents and so on. An industry that has mushroomed out of that is distasteful, dishonest and nasty. It is terrorising borrowers and that needs to be addressed.

I wish the Minister well and I look forward to working with him. However, there are blockages, and they are simple ones. I am glad that the Minister has an overreaching responsibility in planning. I also am glad to see that something I advocated in my county development plan in Tipperary is being considered. It concerns shops and village centre places which are empty for five years or less and which will never again be opened as a shop. In such cases one need not apply for a change of planning and be involved in more preplanning meetings with planners, which one now must wait six weeks for in my county, who will place every obstacle at their disposal to prevent action being taken. As a result, we will get towns alive again, allow people to come in to live in those places and deal with the housing lists as well.

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