Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am. Ten years ago I was involved with the Irish Council for Social Housing. I built houses myself as part of a voluntary association. I should declare that, I suppose. I should have declared that I am not a landlord as well. I have one house, one wife and eight children. I am not a landlord and I never have been. I might be if I inherit a house. Many people inherit houses. I am simply making the point that I have a house and that is all we live in. I have no interest in buying tens of houses. In the case of those who do, it is simply greed. There is something wrong with people who want that many houses. I do not mind if someone inherits a house. They are decent people. They will try to look after it and rent it. They should be supported as well.

Local authorities must be called in and held accountable. They are doing nothing. I could use a derogatory term. It is not the fault of the housing officials at the lower end of the chain. However, the county managers must be held accountable. They have a lovely association. They are untouchable, elected by no one and accountable to no one. What did the former Minister, Mr. Hogan, do? He appointed four or five of those officials who had retired with pensions and so on to the board of Irish Water. We have seen the subsequent scandal. Mr. Hogan was the Minister with responsibility for the environment for a long time. We must call in those to whom I refer. They have to start building houses. There should be one design to build one-bed, two-bed, three-bed and four-bed houses. There should be one design to fit all, except for the site. We can look at sites, the various levels, the land and so on. It need not be a racket for the hiring of consultants to design the five houses the local authority plans to build in my village. Consultants have to be hired in nowadays. What happened to the in-house consultants and engineers?

We never heard the word "consultant" in the 1940s and 1950s when houses were being built but there are consultants for everything now. That is where the money is going. We have heard all of the announcements from the Minister and previous Ministers about funding, but half to two thirds of it is going to paper pushing, consultants, carbon expenses, the City and County Management Association or whatever else and there are no houses being built. The empathy and humanity are gone from the system. The system has gobbled itself up and become too self-embracing and we are not getting anywhere. The banks and vulture funds must be dealt with but we refuse to look at them. As long as we refuse to look at them, the housing lists will grow and grow.

I see Dr. Donal McManus, who is the head of the ICSH, is here and note that the voluntary sector has a role to play. We cut out the red tape seven or eight years ago and made one unit to deal with the voluntary sector. I do not know what county it is in but it streamlined things and was working great. We got a lot of delivery and it was on time. Schemes were built within 15 or 18 months whereas it was taking local authorities four and five years to build them. That unit has now been closed because the mandarins in the Department were not happy with it. It was too efficient, which embarrassed them, so they shut it down and we are back now to all the processes of different Departments. It has gone from one area in County Carlow to Castlebar and back and forward across the country. The most important man seems to be the postman and the delivery man.

There is no security of tenure in the Bill at all and we are fast-tracking evictions. Researchers have said we had the highest number of evictions ever this year and they want to weigh it up. Those families experience sickness, trauma and terror as they wait for eviction, and offering them legal fees to pay the fat cats is not of much use to them if they have to leave their houses. The legal fees do not matter much, do they? We must examine also the landbanks in local authorities to which Deputy McGuinness referred. What the hell are they doing with them? There are approximately 300 acres of land in Clonmel making the town one of the biggest farmers. I do not know if the local authority is getting the single farm payment, but if not, it should be. It bought the land, I suppose in good faith, but will not build on it. There are landbanks in many other villages consisting of zoned lands.

To make matters worse, a business man in Clonmel, who had built a lovely new business in the town ten years ago but which failed, came to me recently about the lovely modern building in which his business had been housed. He had decided to convert it into four apartments. This is an issue relating to the local authority again and it is one where the Minister will have to take the gloves off and talk to the authority. I do not think the Minister ever served on a local authority himself, but I could be wrong.

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