Pat Casey (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The tenant purchase scheme introduced by the previous Government in January has received only 73 applications countrywide to date. The reason given for excluding Part V houses from the tenant purchase scheme was to ensure that the aim of Part V - that is, to have social housing stock available in private housing developments - was not diluted. If, however, the logic of that reason was followed we would not have a tenant purchase scheme at all.

There is a separate debate to be had about the sale and resulting reduction of the limited social housing stock we have, but that is for another day. What is not sensible or appropriate public policy, however, is for the Government to cherry-pick which tenants get the chance to purchase their homes while other tenants are frozen out of the possibility of owning their homes. It should be obvious that equality of treatment must be at the heart of Government policy across all areas, but particularly in respect of housing. A functioning republic is correctly assessed on equality of all citizens before the law. Public policy on housing must be transparent and fair. It should have been obvious to the previous Fine Gael Government that its tenant purchase scheme was not transparent and fair but, as it was not, Fianna Fáil will honour its duty to the people who put us here as reflected in this Bill.

There were previous versions of the tenant purchase scheme in local authority systems. In Wicklow the moneys received were known as internal capital receipts and used to fund other housing-related activities such as refurbishments. The extension of the tenant purchase scheme to all who have the capacity would increase the moneys available to local authorities to reinvest in their housing stock, so from a financial perspective also this is a no-brainer. It is a simple Bill, a one-page, equality-based proposal. I cannot for the life of me think of a single reason to oppose this Bill, even from the political perspective of the Government. Considering that this is a new Dáil with, hopefully, a more pragmatic and inclusive approach to policy formulation, I ask the Minister to convince his colleagues to support this Bill.

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