Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will respond to the debate on behalf of the Labour Party. I commend my colleague Deputy Jan O'Sullivan on introducing this legislation. The Minister of State, Deputy English, is right that our job here is to find solutions. That is why people send Deputies to the House. We have tried to find solutions and I welcome the support of every Deputy who spoke. One or two Deputies who begrudgingly supported the legislation instanced the Labour Party's own time in government, as if by design we set about cutting public expenditure and we went into government to be unpopular. We went into government in 2011 during the worst crisis in the history of the State. We went in with our eyes open, knowing that our job was to try, and without any certainty of success at that time, to restore the economic fortunes of a country that was in economic crisis. I remember being briefed by the troika in advance of going into government and I remember the individual briefings I received from the National Treasury Management Agency, the Department of Finance and so on. I do not want to rehash all of that but there is a fatuous ignorance in the argument that does not recognise how perilous the situation was. It also does not recognise what happened in other countries like Greece, which took a different path to Ireland. Greece remains in mortal economic peril and its social protections have been destroyed.

We can argue about individual issues but it cannot be argued that at the end of that period of government Ireland is not now in a much more favourable economic position where the State can actually make choices. In the second last budget that I had the privilege to introduce we said that the biggest social issue to be addressed was housing and homelessness. The first few bob I could expend was allocated to local authorities to enable them to build houses for people as they had done for decades and to get that going again. That was no easy task because the capacity of local authorities had been hollowed out. We had to allocate 450 scarce positions to allow the local authorities to rebuild their housing departments, which had been destroyed during the boom time when there was a complete dependence on the private sector to provide houses. It strikes me as very odd that we have not made more progress in that regard. That allocation of money was several years ago. Why is it taking so long? I am heartened to hear the Minister of State say that he, the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and others are travelling the State. The housing officers in each local authority talk with us and I have spoken with the Minister, Deputy Murphy, about what they say. They tell us that the levels of sanction required, step by step, by local authorities is hampering their capacity to build houses. Can we not just stop that? Can we just give the local authorities the wherewithal through an allocation of funding and tell them to spend it and to be accountable for it at the end? Let us not have this absolute dead hand upon them.

I also spoke to the Minister about two other points regarding time and costs in planning. There are developers who want to build social affordable housing in my county. One developer told me that nobody was going for the fast-track planning. He said that he wanted to build 400 houses but he would have to apply for them through the local authority in groups of 99 because the fast-track process is slow track. This was some weeks ago. Nobody has got through the fast-track process. I ask the Minister of State to look into this. The costs involved in the fast-track process are more expensive because of the additional impositions that are put on builders. I also spoke with a smaller builder who wanted to build 27 houses in Wexford, which would be 27 very valuable houses. He has had full planning permission since last January but it was appealed by a third party and it took until September for An Bord Pleanála to make a decision on the appeal. An Bord Pleanála told him that it did not have the capacity to make quicker decisions.

These are things we can and should fix. I will not mention some of the comments made over the past number of days which others have referenced. The Minister of State is a quintessentially decent person, but it is unfortunate that there was a confluence of commentary which seemed to minimise what everybody agrees is the biggest social issue we have to overcome. If we are seen to somehow seek to make it normal or whatever the unfortunate phrase was, it is simply that - unfortunate. Let us put that behind us now and have a consensus in the House that the biggest social issue this Oireachtas has to resolve has two subsets, namely, the homelessness issue and the housing issue. We have the financial wherewithal to do it, but we must insist on it being done.

It is the Minister of State's job to say nice things about the local authorities, which, by and large, are good. However, they are not uniformly good. Some are better than others and some are not building the local authority houses they should be. I was pleased to hear the leader of the Fianna Fáil Party instance my own county as the most successful house builder this year, but we need to ensure that the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government insists that a quota is set and the houses are built by each local authority. We heard Deputy Connolly talk about staffing. If there are individual issues, let us address them case by case in an open manner so that no one can hide behind an issue. These are fundamentally important issues.

I return in the last two and a half minutes I have to the Bill before us. Our job is to find solutions, as I said. We have proposed solutions to the House before. The last housing Bill Deputy Jan O'Sullivan produced in the House dealt with a number of things. We should be bold and revisit that. It is unfortunate that the Government decided not to support the Bill. Fianna Fáil did not support it either and it died. However, it had three important components. First was the implementation of the Kenny report after decades to control the price of building land. If we do not do that, we will head into another crisis. I have listened to learned legal opinion that this is a constitutional issue which would require a referendum. My view is a simple one. Let us do it and, if someone wants to take a constitutional challenge, off with them. We can then determine the matter. Can we just legislate for the Kenny report? I ask the Minister of State to do that.

Why not have uniform rent controls across the country until the supply side issue is addressed? The supply side issue must be addressed and it will be. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Simon Coveney, who is just joining us, started the process himself in pulling together an all-party consensus. Until it is done, why not have a national strategy on rent controls which ties rent increases to the consumer price index as an interim measure until supply is normalised? That is not an unreasonable expectation or demand. The control of the price of building land and giving tenants certainty could stabilise problems that manifest themselves in terrible hardship until such time as we solve the problem. From the time I started talking about this in government, we have all known that everything we do in terms of schemes or plans are ancillary to the main objective of providing sufficient houses. That is done simply by requiring local authorities to do what they did for generations, namely, build more local authority houses.

See this speech in context