Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank colleagues for tabling this Bill in Private Members' time. I do not doubt at all their commitment to the issue and their wish, like all of us, for a resolution. I would love if we could include this in the Constitution as a right and fulfil it but, as matters stand, we would be as well enshrining the right to the winning lottery numbers because, sadly, more would be left without them than would have them. That is the sad reality. I support the amendment and the proposal to have the relevant Oireachtas committee examine this matter and bring forward recommendations on how best to implement the legislation and, more particularly, take action in respect of the provision of the housing that is needed throughout the country.

There is a housing emergency, yet we are kicking the issue around like a football, blaming one another about what should, could or might have been done. We are no closer to a workable solution. I do not doubt the Minister's commitment to the job. I had the pleasure of working with him for two years on the banking inquiry and I know how diligent he is in approaching any topic. I am sure he will try to do his best with this issue. Even before he walked into the Department to take up his role, he was strangled by bureaucracy and process. I have a document that is quite heavy and that outlines the Department's streamlined approval process for social housing. God help us all if this is the streamlined version. I examined four schemes that are before the Department and by means of which approximately 80 units will be provided. None is in County Sligo and, therefore, I do not want anybody to beat up the local authority there. The date of origin of the schemes was May 2015. None has proceeded beyond stage 2, with one still at stage 1 and awaiting approval. The lead time for the provision of a social housing unit is between two and a half and six years from conception to turnkey. The equivalent time in the private sector is three years maximum assuming finance is available, although that is an issue currently. We cannot tackle an emergency with such bureaucracy. The reason for this arduous, interminable process is the obsession with cost certainty at a level that is impossible to secure. We must, of course, get value for money and we must get the price as close as we can to the forecast outcome but, unfortunately, it is not a precise science. Architects, engineers and administrators within the Department deal with architects, engineers and administrators within local authorities who, in turn, bring in private sector expertise such as consulting engineers and so on. The level of duplication and repetitiveness in this process is strangling the Minister before he even begins. If he signed off tomorrow on the construction of 50,000 houses in Dublin and gave the cash to the four local authorities, there would not be a key turned in one of them if the process outlined in this document was followed in under three years. How many more people would be homeless or living in hotels, bed and breakfast accommodation or converted Garda stations or Army barracks in that period?

Before he gets to money, the Minister needs to be radical. He needs to tear up the existing document and get it down to a few pages. That is not about reducing quality, standards or anything else; it is about applying common sense to getting the job done. There is delay on the part of the Department, which is being blamed on local authorities, and vice versa, even though the unit in Ballina will say off the record that there is no cash and that it cannot do this and that even if there was cash, it would have to go through this process. Perhaps the process would be shorter if more cash was available but the Minister needs to take this 100-page document and tear it apart because nothing will happen in the meantime.

The second issue is that 933 housing units in Dublin alone have been boarded up for more than ten years. This is replicated, relatively speaking, in every county. That should be a priority. How much would it cost to refurbish every unit? Why have local authorities an innate objection to purchasing houses on former council schemes? They are cheaper but the local authorities refused to do that during the recession and now they are paying between €300,000 and €600,000 for units all over the country, particularly in Dublin. They also refused to buy houses on private sector schemes, which were boarded up or which were bought by somebody before being put up for sale on the open market at a lower price. That is a matter we need to address. Deputy Cowen mentioned units over shops in towns and so on and that should also be examined.

Another aspect of the four-stage process for social housing is local authorities are told to begin the process and bring in however many staff they need to approve the schemes. They have to get staff in whether they are architects, engineers or whatever. There is no certainty that the scheme will be approved within three or four years. All of a sudden, the local authorities have obligations because they have given these people full-time jobs with pensions and so on, which are costly. I can think of two instances where local authorities are refusing to recruit these staff because of their experience in dealing with the Department. During the boom, when the Department's policy was that local authorities should buy land and not be subservient to builders and developers, they did that. Smaller local authorities such as Sligo County Council got into significant debt. Then Mr. Paul Lemass, an assistant secretary in the Department, and his colleagues threw them under the bus and said they were reckless and should not have spent all this money. I am sorry but that was not the case. Sligo County Council, like every other local authority, is engaged in the provision of services to the people. The buck stops with the Department, which approved the loans, purchases and schemes years ago. That is making local authorities reluctant to engage in the process.

From a private sector perspective, money needs to be made available, apart from to the chosen few at the very top who have the ability to refinance throughout the world. Their names have been thrown about in the debate. The average builder who constructed two, five or ten houses in towns and villages around the country is now subservient to a vulture fund. Many people have been taken out of the industry. They cannot get money and if they applied for funding, they would have to match it themselves. We must press ahead with establishing a bank dedicated to housing, which we proposed in our election manifesto, as did Fine Gael, and which would be similar to the ICC-ACC model of the 1970s and 1980s that successfully helped farmers and industry.

We have An Bord Pleanála, An Taisce and other bodies that want planning to be correct but there is a crisis in Dublin. Five or six apartment and office blocks were refused planning permission near the airport over the past year because of congestion but we cannot go over so many storeys because An Bord Pleanála or whoever has stated we cannot go up 20, 30 or 40 storeys.

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