Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

With reference to Deputy Penrose's contribution, I am very disappointed in the report in regard to the development of a community banking system. Such a system is essential for continuing development in rural Ireland and disadvantaged communities in urban areas because both have difficulty in having banks like AIB and Bank of Ireland take any real interest in the community. It seems there is a very conservative hand in operation in the Department of Finance at the moment.

We all understand the legacy of the bank collapse, the greed that drove it and how difficult the recovery was for people all over Ireland. However, we are a country with an increasing population, we have Brexit to deal with and we are also an attractive location for foreign direct investment, which we hope will continue. A key element is that we should be able to provide a significant amount of development capital, in particular in the context of a community banking model based on the Sparkasse model. Let us remember that the big difference between many of the German regions, particularly in the old West Germany, is they have a long, intergenerational tradition of SME industries which provide local employment in areas comparable to Sligo, Longford or Wexford but which are not dependent on somebody making every decision in a branch head office in a city comparable to Dublin.

I link this to the Bill because, as I said as I concluded my earlier remarks, I believe we should be taking a housing development bank approach. Housing development banks and development banks for development purposes are familiar vehicles all around the world. In fact, Dr. Kim, the head of the World Bank, said recently that the World Bank made a mistake in not focusing on people-based development, whether in education or housing, and how to give people the chance to live a decent life with self-sufficiency and engagement in employment - the Minister of State's officials can check this if they want to. If that is then pivoted to Ireland at present, what is the most serious crisis we face? It is the fact we have a booming population - a great thing to have - and an insufficiency of houses, brought on by the crash. However, the crash is over and we have moved away from that. Basically, Fine Gael is proving too nervous, too frightened, to act with a strong sense of how to develop housing to the correct scale and number.

The Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government can, believe it or not, open one house in Ballyfermot which has been renovated under one of the schemes available, and he gets huge television and other media coverage. That is great but it is just one house. There is no scale. We need to be talking about developing houses in the thousands. The development bank approach would allow us to utilise the publicly owned lands that the State has provided and to marry that to an affordable purchase. It could also be mirrored in rural Ireland, where a family could provide a young family member with a site, and the build cost of the house could be the loan advanced by the home building finance authority.

I speak as a Deputy for Dublin West, where there is an intense frenzy in land prices which is as bad, if not worse, than in the two or three years before the crash. This has to serve as a warning to the Government. In many housing developments on the north side and the western fringe of the capital, although we thought €50,000 was a high site value cost, the cost is now reaching the €100,000 mark, and I will not speak about south County Dublin and the south side because it is higher again there. We have public lands. If we marry those public lands with the capital availability, as the Bill sets out, we can attract propositions from builders who may be building in relatively small numbers across Ireland - ten, 20 or 50 houses at a time - but who cannot get finance from ordinary banks because they have an impaired credit rating due to the crash.

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The Bill proposes, therefore, to make finance available to the purchasers who are key to our future social and economic development. It used to be the case that an Irish soldier serving the State working in the Army who was not earning huge wages but who had a partner and children could afford a house. I look at my own family members who bought houses in that situation. However, such soldiers cannot do it now. A family in west Dublin pays more in rent than they would if they were making repayments on an affordable mortgage on an equivalent property. Many people in Fine Gael and, perhaps, the Department of Finance are very far removed from the world in which people live in rented homes in childhood and early adulthood. It is the experience of someone like me. I know what it is like for those who, having been brought up in a rented house, have gone through college, got a job and used that more substantial and consistent income to buy an affordable house with a mortgage. We had examples of co-operatives to which local authorities provided public housing land at a moderate price. We must look at the Bill in a more creative way to establish what we can open up to the type of person who really needs the housing.

There are many good small and medium builders right around Ireland. If we can get them going, it will make significant inroads into the housing demand from young people. If it does not happen, young people will leave for places like Australia and they will not come back. Very often, they will get better money there. A young lad working as a builder in Mayo or Sligo might be able to get a site at low or no cost through family, but he and his partner may not have the capacity to build by taking out what by Dublin standards would be a relatively modest mortgage, albeit one that would not be modest by the lower wage standards that apply in many parts of rural Ireland. We have to be very specific about this.

The Government has an overweening obsession with photographs, public launches and the strategic communications unit by any other name. I note the case of O'Devaney Gardens which is located beside the place I grew up and where my mother is from. I have referred to it 20 times and it has broken my heart. It is beside the Phoenix Park on a gorgeous site. At the time of the crash, the Government said it would give all of these sites in Dublin to Bernard McNamara. As a consequence, many perfectly viable flats were knocked down. The flats in O'Devaney Gardens were lovely, dual balcony flats and their nickname locally was "the luxuries". They were luxury flats because they were lovely. They needed regular maintenance. Can Members imagine a lovely flat with a balcony at the front and a balcony at the back looking out at a courtyard and the Dublin Mountains, respectively? That is how nice the site is. What we had yesterday was like the joke about how many people it takes to change a light bulb. How many Ministers does it take to turn a small bit of sod on a site for 56 units? While I welcome the units, nearly 300 families lost their homes there when they were moved out.

Can we be more ambitious about the legislation and, indeed, in general on the deadlines the Government is setting for itself? Relatively few people on the Government benches need housing urgently, but I am sure many of the younger Deputies feel the pinch of an extortionate market in which prices continue to rise. We need the Government to think wisely about its interventions to provide for affordable purchase housing and affordable social renting. It is a total inversion of market rules to have rents higher than mortgage repayments. I acknowledge that the Department's newer staff are preparing all sorts of position papers, but they should please read their Keynes and the various commentaries on housing. It is an absolute inversion of how a market should function that rent is dearer than purchase. That is all wrong. The Minister of State did not mention a specific target but it could be a couple of thousand houses a year.

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