John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to participate in the debate. We must look at what is happening in the courts. I am delighted that the Courts Bill 2016 has been somewhat derailed in terms of the change of jurisdiction from the High Court to the Circuit Court because all the Bill will do is speed up evictions, including those relating to buy-to-let properties. The latter are still people’s homes. We heard earlier that those people should be protected. We must start at the beginning and protect people in their own homes. The Circuit Court and the county registrar’s list are simply not working. They are not fit for purpose. They take no consideration whatsoever of individual families that will lose their homes. They constantly bring them back, either before the registrar or the Circuit Court and they continue the trauma and damage that is being done to families in this country by threatening their homes and by allowing the banks to continue to threaten them.

The local authority does not have the means to respond to the numbers being threatened with repossession. We should stop it through legislation and prevent families from losing their homes. We did it with all of the larger accounts and transferred them to NAMA. Why can we not set up some sort of agency that will take over the mortgages that have gone wrong, keep people in their homes and allow them to work it out? Why do we allow vulture funds to come in here, clean up on our tax arrangements and, again, threaten small businesses and families in their properties? It is not acceptable. We are crying crocodile tears in respect of this Bill if we do not address the kernel of the problem, which is what I have just outlined.

Alongside that problem, there are those homes that have been repossessed by the banks. I think the number is somewhere in the region of 400 for Bank of Ireland, mainly centred around Dublin, all of which are empty. Ulster Bank has repossessed somewhere in the region of 500. Again, they are all still empty. If we have a housing crisis, why are the banks allowed to leave those houses empty without enabling the local authorities or the voluntary sector to purchase those houses and to put tenants into them who are waiting to get a roof over their heads? It is simply a crazy situation. We are told by AIB that next year, it will have about 6,000 cases that will be coming down the line in respect of repossession. Bank of Ireland has told us that the repossession cases will increase dramatically in 2017. This Bill is looking at the process to allow planning permission to be granted more quickly. Have we learned nothing from Irish Water or the HSE? The minute there is a problem, we think of something major like a major agency - another quango - or more legislation to deal with the problems. Why do we not look back to the county councils? I have listened carefully to every speaker here. All of them have complimented their own councils, identified sites and asked for action on them. The only thing that is short in respect of the delivery of housing by councils is the fact they do not have the money.

The council lists are being massaged. There are those who cannot go on the list but who cannot raise a loan. In my opinion, they are in need of housing. There are those on the HAP scheme who are thrown to some ruthless landlords who will not look after their property. There are those on the RAS scheme or rent allowance who suffer the same plight, are facing no standards and poor accommodation and are wondering when they will have secure accommodation.

Like others here this evening, I can pick out three different sites in my constituency that would adequately house homes and care for the elderly. Those sites are owned by the HSE. There are existing buildings on those sites that could be refurbished and re-presented as living units within a setting that provides care for the elderly. There are vacant houses in counties nationwide that for some reason, councils fail to bring to the letting stage because of some notion that they need all sorts of things done with them. I have seen vacant houses in my constituency that were vacated for some reason or other but are ready to live in and yet the local authority will board them up and allow them to be damaged beyond belief when it will cost a fortune to repair them and not let them. Somebody has to ask them why because every county has a chief executive officer. These people are paid well and have enough staff and yet they do not deliver in the context of the crisis we face. We can look to the banks for a solution to some of these problems because they have the houses. We can look to the courts and the legislation surrounding that to keep people in their houses. It is my firm belief that if we insist that county managers, or CEOs as they are now known, do their job, we will have sites that will be developed.

My fear about this Bill and An Bord Pleanála is that it bypasses local input from councillors and people who know how these developments can happen. There is nothing that can replace local knowledge. We must ensure the development of houses fits into the area for which it is planned, that it does not infringe on the rights of other residents in that area in respect of size and dimension of the properties and that we have good planning. There is no better way to safeguard that than to have it locally focused. The danger is we will now attempt to reduce the size of apartments or else build them to the minimum standard that is required. It will be up to councils and community activists to ensure the future tenants of these properties are protected because there is nothing as bad as imposing a development for quite a number of houses on an existing site in a city or urban area where there are no facilities. All the discussions I have heard have centred around the provision of housing. We must be extremely careful about the quality of those houses and the manner in which they are planned and there must be council input into those housing proposals. There is nothing strange about that. If you look back to the 1950s when most of the local authority houses were built, they were built well, were provided with green areas and were accessible to urban areas and they worked. Many large families were reared in three-bedroom houses. Many parents had 11 children in a three-bedroom local authority house. We have to go back to arranging our construction and the delivery of houses around the sensible notion that you can have houses built by local authorities in the local area and put through the local councils with the local councils being made responsible for them. What is so wrong with that?

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