Eamon Scanlon (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have an opportunity to speak on this. I also compliment my colleague, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, on bringing this legislation forward. I listened attentively to the Minister, Deputy Murphy, when he was speaking. I respectfully suggest to him that he should read the Bill. I listened to his contribution very attentively, and he said that this could have an effect on social housing and on Part V planning. This has nothing to do with social housing or with Part V.

I raised an issue in the Dáil in March 2018 concerning 178 houses being built in Lucan. A friend of mine told me that every house in the development was bought by vulture funds. People were queueing at the offices to rent these houses. The houses were finished on a Friday evening and people were in them on a Monday morning paying €2,200 a month in rent. This is what happened in March 2018. Since then, thousands of houses across Dublin city have been bought by vulture funds because of the return they are getting.

This Bill is trying to curtail what is happening. It does not affect social housing anywhere or any public lands that are available for building social housing. This Bill tries to give an opportunity to young people to get a house and a roof over their heads. This is not too much to ask for in this day and age. It is crucial that young people have an opportunity to purchase a home for themselves.

Since I raised this issue, 3,000 houses have been bought by vulture funds across Dublin city. This means that young couples and young people, even if they had the help of their parents and had funding from banks, could not have bought the houses because the houses would not have been available to them. These people have been wiped out of the market. I hope that this Bill will ensure that at least 30% of the many thousands of houses that I am sure will be built on private sites will be available for these people to purchase.

Another issue arises with the national housing agency in respect of my own county. I checked the figures today. Seventy-two applications were made to the national housing agency for loans up to October 2019. Of these, 35 were refused.

These applications are not going in willy-nilly. Council staff are looking after these applications, which are 100% correct before they go in, but yet 35 people were refused because the same commercial criteria are being used as do the banks. If we are serious about helping these people who want to buy or build a home of their own, we have to loosen the criteria and give these people a little headroom. I know of families who are paying more in rent than they would pay for a mortgage. There is something wrong. These people have been paying rent for the last seven or eight years and in our part of the world, the houses are half the price of what they are here in Dublin. People would be taken off HAP or the housing list. They should be given a bit of support because this national Housing Agency system is not working for people. I ask the Minister to look at this and see what can be done. There are many issues that I could raise but I do not have much time.

In 1947, after the war, the Government of the day was able to build 58 houses in my home town. That was replicated across every town in the country. Here we are today, supposedly one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and we cannot build a house. We need to get serious. This will not be solved in just one way. Many issues need to be sorted out. Hundreds of units of accommodation across this country in town centres, over businesses, are not being used. If those people had any sort of incentive to make that accommodation available, I think they would do so.

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