Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising the issue. I agree with him that there is no excuse for 90 houses to be lying idle. If that is the case, I urge Louth County Council to discuss funding options with us.

To be clear, we have a voids programme which provides funding to refurbish housing. I understand that, this year, Louth County Council applied for 16 and was granted 15, and a claim was recently put in to draw down €166,000, which was paid out. We wrote to every local authority in October this year to ask them again if they had any vacant properties or voids, to bring them forward, and we told them that if these could be completed and tenanted before 14 December, we would be in a position to fund them. I am not aware of any additional application by Louth County Council for 90 units or anything close to that.

If 90 units are lying vacant that the council believes it cannot fund, we have a voids programme that has funded nearly 10,000 voids in recent years. Like many other councils, Louth County Council has brought forward many voids and I congratulate it on that. There is a great pipeline of projects and great work is being done in that regard. If Louth County Council has 90 properties, as the Deputy said, the voids programme is there to be used. We wrote to all the councils in October to tell them to use it and to draw down funding. Other counties have come forward with an additional 30, 40 or 50 units and we have provided the funding for that. There might be some confusion in this regard but there are funding options.

We do not have a timeframe for voids. There is some confusion. I have followed some of the debate about long-term and short-term in Louth. We do not specify a term because, if we did, people might be encouraged to leave houses vacant for a long time. We provide the funding to fix them. We are open to discussing that. We have a very good relationship with the Louth County Council. I have met representatives of it on numerous occasions. In this case some clarity may be required but the funding is there. I am not aware that there are 92 vacant council properties. I reckon from our research that maybe there are 40 and, if that is the case, we certainly would like to bring them back into use and fund them.

We are aware that there are other vacant properties that Louth County Council has purchased and we have used them as best example because it has done great work under the purchase and renew scheme, which is fully funded by our Department. There will be no issue of costs left if a council has purchased vacant properties, Louth being one of the leaders in this, and we cover the costs to purchase and repair them and bring them back into use. Louth has looked for 32 which were approved successfully and work is being carried out. It applied this week or last week for a further 36 under that scheme. I have no doubt that we will process them very quickly because it has done great work.

It is not the case that the council is left carrying the bill. The Department funds that scheme under purchase and renew and I am very clear about that because it is a scheme we want to encourage more local authorities to do. Louth has been the leading one in this and has done great work. We certainly would not leave it hanging for money, as it were, because we want vacancy tackled and the Deputy's local authority has been one of the best at doing that. It has been used at many of our housing summits as the best example of the purchase and renew scheme. We would encourage more of that. If there are several voids lying idle, we would ask it to bring them forward.

In general, maintenance historically has been carried out by Louth County Council, as by every other local authority. We fund the voids programme of houses that are left empty and need work done on them. We encourage local authorities to do their own maintenance. I understand the council is in the middle of budget discussions. I believe councillors should vote to have some money set aside for general routine maintenance but we do fund putting vacant properties back into use. The taxpayer, through our Department, has funded more than 10,000 this year. We had money and we wrote to everybody to do that this year. There is still time if they have vacant properties that they want to bring back into use. We have not started the month of December. They can give us a shout and we will see if we can sort this out.

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