Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish the two Ministers the best. When the Minister is finished with his phone, I will mention someone who was on the phone to me in my office. This person has been on the waiting list in Galway city for 15 years. Earlier today the woman who works with me in Galway told me about a call from a woman with six children who is pregnant with a seventh child. She has been in a bed and breakfast in Galway city for the last 15 months. The Simon Community has been producing its periodic Locked Out of the Market reports to provide a snapshot of a point in time. On average, only approximately 5.5% of the rental market is within reach of the housing assistance payment, HAP. The HAP was of course introduced by Fine Gael and Labour. It is a major problem. If the Government is seriously interested in dealing with the housing crisis, it must set a date for the end of HAP. Its cost doubled in one year. The last figure I saw was approaching €500 million. It is now higher than that. That money goes straight into the landlords' pockets. Moreover, the tenant is left to come up with a top-up payment. It used to be an under-the-counter payment. Now it is an over-the-counter payment, fully endorsed by city councils and local authorities. We are actively bolstering the private market.

I thank Deputy Ó Broin for tabling the motion. I have some difficulty with some of the wording concerning affordable housing, but I support the tenor of the motion. We need to recognise we have a crisis, just as we did with the climate. We have a housing crisis. We have a crisis because we relied on the market to no avail. We did not build a house in Galway between 2009 and 2016. We used to file quarterly reports on the housing situation that would state how many houses would be built. From 2009 onwards, that column stated that construction was suspended. We have begun to build a small number of houses in Galway.

It is difficult to get the housing figures, of course, because someone in receipt of HAP comes off the waiting list even though we were told that did not happen. Such a person is considered to be adequately housed. This adds to the total dishonesty of the language in this area. We are now calling HAP placements social housing. We take recipients off the waiting list and say they are adequately housed. On Sunday last, I was on a political panel. The councillors on that panel said there were approximately 4,500 households on the waiting list. That figure refers to households, so we can assume that between 10,000 and 15,000 people are waiting for a house in Galway city.

We have no master plan for the city. Public land and private land is being developed by developers without a master plan. It is on the Dáil record that on two occasions Deputy Coveney agreed with me when I said that development in Galway was developer-led. We have no master plan. The Galway city development plan calls for the city council to facilitate master plans drawn up by developers. A vast amount of land in the docks is held in trust for the people of Galway by one company. We have 14 acres of land at Ceannt Station. There are 21 acres of land on Sandy Road, some of it public and some of it private. I do not know how much is public and how much is private.

I am intensely worried by the role of the Land Development Agency. I understand that just as there were 12 apostles, there are 12 members of that Land Development Agency. Of these, three are women and the other nine are a mixture of developers, bankers and so on. They are looking at that Sandy Road site in Galway. Before I came down here, I looked again at what has happened. The Land Development Agency used public money to engage five architects to come up with their vision. Does the Minister know what the video presentation of one of those architects said? It called the site a place to live well by accident. We are paying taxpayers' money for this.

The vision statement calls for "a high-quality mixed use regeneration project, seeking to create a new sustainable neighbourhood in Galway City with usable public amenity [if Members can imagine that] in a vibrant and inclusive development". There is no mention of a housing crisis. As an afterthought, it adds that a "strong residential bias for the site is being sought". This is public land, by and large, and we are asking for the vision of architects, who tell us it is a place to live well by accident. There is no mention of a housing crisis or the housing task force that was set up under pressure because of the enormity of the housing problem in Galway. There is public land and institutional land in lots of places. There is no vision and no master plan and the Land Development Agency is pursuing developer-led development.

At this stage I would almost give up, but I cannot. It is a privilege to be here and to have been elected for the second time. Since February 2016, I have been making exactly the same speech about housing and the housing crisis. I appeal to the Minister of State as a member of the Green Party. If we are going to have any change, let us make language mean something. Let us make Galway an example of sustainable development. I agreed with Deputy Naughten when he spoke about balanced regional development. That is another part of the problem and the solution. I represent a constituency that runs from the Aran Islands to south Mayo. Many towns are going under because of a complete lack of support from the Government. Let us look at all possible solutions. Ultimately, the Minister will have my support if he builds public housing on public land in recognition of the serious emergency that we face.

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