Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The fact that, through the CSO, we have identified 180,000 empty residential units as well as perhaps over 25,000 above shop units, which could potentially be available for residential property, indicates the chronic failure of public policy in the face of an enormous housing and homelessness emergency. In so far as this Bill attempts to address one aspect of that, I welcome it and commend Fianna Fáil, which is a rare enough thing for me to do, but it is right to identify it and seek to address it. However, the issue is whether the Bill actually address the problem. The proposers of the Bill have rightly and humbly acknowledged that it will have to be examined in detail. We need to look at many aspects of it and I would underline those points. We cannot have anything that leads us back to tenement style living, overcrowding, bedsits, shoddy quality, unsafe, hazardous or low quality accommodation which exploits the housing and homelessness emergency to degrade standards of accommodation for the people who need it. I do not suggest that is what the Bill intends to do - I know it is not - but we must be extremely careful that is not the consequence. We must also be extremely careful that the consequence is not profiteering in the other direction.

Even if we free up these units as we must, if there are not conditions around it or if we do not have the right type of regime to do it, there is nothing to stop the private owners of those properties charging extortionate rents and contributing absolutely nothing to dealing with the housing and homelessness emergency. We could just facilitate them making a lot of extra money out of their property and not really helping in any way with the crisis. That does not help anything. While the target of this legislation is correct in stating we have to free up these units for people who desperately need housing or accommodation, and I agree and it is right that we should progress the Bill and discuss it very seriously, we need to remember that there are two aspects to our failure to do this to date. One is a failure in public policy and a failure of the State to intervene in the housing market, and the other is the fact the majority of vacant units of all sorts are in private hands, and the private market has shown no interest in making them available to people who need them because its primary interest is the value of the asset or the money that can be made off it. We need to bear that in mind when we are trying to come up with a regime that will free these up, that it should make them available and that it should not degrade the standards.

Absolutely, fire safety cannot be sacrificed in this. This is absolutely critical. Even if Deputy Cowen says this will not degrade the current controls, let us remember the current controls are not actually being enforced anywhere. It is one thing to have legislation, but if we do not have people to enforce the legislation it is meaningless, and this could potentially become a licence for people to build substandard accommodation. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Even if this does pass with all of these checks, there is no guarantee that the owners of those properties would still consider it viable from their point of view to make these properties available, and we need to consider local authorities getting hold of these vacant properties and putting the money in themselves to refurbish them rather than simply waiting for private owners to do so.

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