Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I, too, express my disappointment that the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, is not present. One could be forgiven for suspecting that the leadership contest is more important than this Bill. It could be a very important one, if things were done right. Clearly, the Minister is eager to avoid trips and falls between now and 2 June. I have a lot of respect for him, but he has made a dog's dinner of dealing with the housing crisis. Things are worse now than they were a year ago. There have been very few improvements anywhere along the line. Homes are not going up but prices are. The Government is partially responsible for this and the Minister holds a certain responsibility if he is to allow the Department to behave in the manner it is behaving.

Cairn Homes and Hines Ireland control over half of the sites in the Dublin area. They have a vested interest in not building and it makes sense for them not to build. They will build bugger all in the next year or year and a half. They will build when prices have increased further. The decisions the Minister has taken are driving up prices and amount to a subsidy for developers. Builders are interested in building. It is not that there is no one to build; rather, developers have a vested interest in not building now, especially those who have sites. They are land bankers. Every time the price of housing goes up by 10%, the value of the sites on which developers are sitting goes up by a minimum of 30%. The Government can do the maths, but I can give it a breakdown of the figures. Developers would be off their heads to build because of the way the system is operating.

The Government will have to cop onto itself and start building houses. I am not asking local authority members to go out with picks and shovels and start building, but local authorities could employ builders who are not looking for a profit margin of €15,000 per unit. Some would be very happy if they cleared €5,000 on every house they built, but a developer is a different animal. The Government appears to think things will never happen unless the big boys are involved, but they do not want to build now because a climate has been created in which it does not make sense for them to build. The State has an incredible amount of land on which to build. Members of the housing committee asked Mr. Dick Brady why local authorities did not have CPO land on which to build in order to get things going. He said there was no reason in the wide earthly world to use CPOs because the State had loads of land. He told us that there was planning permission for over 20,000 units and that there was permission for multiples of that figure in zoned areas. We are now considering giving land to developers in order to encourage them to build on it. Hines Ireland and Cairn Homes alone control over half of the sites in Dublin. Why will the Government not start building social and affordable housing? I do not understand its rationale. It is neoliberal thinking. The Government seems to be bogged down in the notion that only the private sector can deliver housing.

It is a case of organising builders. It is not true to say they are not available. I know loads of builders who would love to build but cannot access finance or sites. The Government could employ them to build housing units to get things moving. It is a failed policy. To whom is the Government listening? Is it listening to the lobbyists such as Cairn Homes, Hines Ireland and the CIF? It should listen to the geography department in Maynooth which makes a rational case for how the Government should operate, but that is not what it is doing. The English, as they now know, have made incredible mistakes in this area. They are not addressing them properly, but we can learn from them. However, we are not doing so.

I understand why the Minister is not in the House. He was a very impressive Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine and did an excellent job. He is a very capable man, one for whom I have a lot of respect, but he is not doing a good job in housing provision. For some reason or other, whether it be ideological or that he is listening to the wrong people, he is going in the wrong direction. At this stage, I can only assume that things will get worse before they get better, unless the Government chooses to take a different path. This is not rocket science. We have many problems in how we supply housing in Ireland, be it private, social, affordable or rental. We are snowed under, but the problems can be fixed. While nothing can be fixed overnight, we could start, but we are not doing that and I do not understand why.

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