Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will repeat the point I made earlier. A solution to this problem is staring us in the face but we are not tackling it in this context. Vacant houses do not require JCBs or builders. They only require a key in the hands of the tenant so they can go up to the house and turn it. In this city alone, there are 36,000 such homes. We do not know how long they have been vacant. I acknowledge and welcome the Minister's initiative. We should look at further incentives to landlords if necessary to bring houses onto the market. I agree with Deputy O'Sullivan's point about the stick and the carrot. I will repeat my point and accept I may not have particular support for it in the House but I have it outside. We have to bring in a tax on houses that are empty for two years or more. It will be a tax on an empty home and there should be no issue of somebody having died and the property not being sorted out. There should be no issues with estate management and the division of property and stuff like that within the family. Other countries are dealing with it. Britain, Scotland and Canada, including Vancouver, are dealing with it. I have been doing my own research on the web. It is being dealt with. Where there is a significant shortage of houses, this has been introduced and it works.

As a member of the housing committee, I looked at this issue about NAMA. I am not commenting on any of the issues that have been discussed in other rooms in this House about properties and all of that. It is an undeniable, incontrovertible fact that NAMA offered 6,890 family homes, dwellings or flats, 73% of which were apartments, to local authorities up and down the country. Whatever one says about NAMA, one cannot dispute the fact it offered the homes to local authorities which took 2,700 of them. That is also a fact. The other fact is that if estates were unfinished, NAMA has made it exceptionally clear in the correspondence. I submitted FOI requests to every local authority in the country to look at this issue. NAMA offered to put them back into shipshape so they could be used as dwellings. It said if they were vandalised after that, it would bring them up to proper, habitable standards. That is a damning indictment of local authorities. Some 800 homes were turned down by some, not all, of the four local authorities in the greater Dublin area. That is 800 houses that people could be in tonight as tenants. All of the homeless families in hotels in Dublin this very night could have been in a council-owned or council-leased property if the councils had acted but they did not.

My final point goes back to the point that was made on the other side of the House. Local authorities have land. The health boards have land. Bus Éireann, Irish Rail and a lot of the State companies have land. It is not being built on. In many cases, local authorities do not have the money to invest. There is a very simple answer. We should go for a public private partnership. The council would own the land. We should go for a public private partnership and tell the developers to build the houses and the Government will provide the services. That is why the Minister in supplying €200 million in the budget to service land around the country. We need to look a bit harder at these issues. We need local authorities to act. If they do not have the funds, there are funds out there in the marketplace and there are funds with the Irish Strategic Investment Fund. Funding is available for housing. It is available at a pretty low rate of interest. All of this debate today is very important. It will not put one extra home on the market. It will not do that right now but it will give certainty to people who are renting. For God's sake, let us examine again why those people are on the streets of Dublin, why they have occupied that property and why there is anger and rage at the empty houses around the country with nobody in them. We must stand up for the ordinary people of this country. We must do it. The Minister is doing this in giving them certainty for their rent future. We need to do more. We cannot put back the clock. What happened in the past is done. We can insist on radical alternatives. I do not think it is radical to bring in a tax on empty homes if they are empty for two years or more. It took some time for us to stare this rent issue in the face.

I read with disgust comments today of so-called landlords. I do not know if anybody has read it.

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