Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill today. The Land Development Agency Bill is one of the transformative measures in bringing about accelerated social and affordable housing in this country. I am glad that it is my colleague, the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, who is leading the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage because Fianna Fáil over many decades has been known as a party that in good and in bad times delivered on housing and communities. When I think of all the local authority housing schemes in my constituency, most were built during times when Fianna Fáil was in government.

I am glad, therefore, that it is a Fianna Fáil Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, who is heading the Department as a partner in a coalition government.

I see many positives in the Bill. I note the Land Development Agency is already working on nine sites throughout the country developing 4,000 homes. It is very important that many of these homes are affordable. Like many Members of the House, before I was elected to Dáil Eireann I was a county councillor. I was very involved in housing policy committees and in observing how all of this happens at grass roots level. Far too many people on our housing waiting lists do not necessarily need to be on a social housing list. Many of them have incomes, although they are low to medium incomes, and they should be on affordable housing lists. The drive now by the Government is to provide more affordable housing so that those who have low to medium incomes can go forward and end up owning homes in their own right and this is hugely important. It has been part of the Irish psyche for many years.

Some say we should live in high-rise apartments in city centres. I do not think that is fully sustainable for our country. It is good to see small villages and towns throughout Ireland sharing population bases. It brings vitality back to places. I have seen far too much rural decline in my constituency. We have a two tier Ireland with the east coast thriving and some parts of the west coast lagging behind. We also have two-tiered development in each county. In County Clare we see the middle column of the county driving on, accelerated and accentuated by the presence of Shannon Airport industrial hubs, but when we go further east or west of this we see rural decline week on week and month on month.

A key element of the Bill is that it will initially deal with land banks in towns with 10,000 or more people. There is a need for added scope for social and affordable housing to become a feature of our smaller villages to breathe life into them. Most rural Deputies can relate to the long-standing battles many of us have fought to retain a local schoolteacher or to keep a post office, shop, pub or bank open. This week, we have been speaking about Bank of Ireland announcing many closures of its branches. All of this is predicated on having a population base in a small village. We can only have a population base if there are houses and children playing on the streets and in playgrounds and going to school during the day and bringing vitality back. There is a need to go beyond towns with a population threshold of 10,000 and get this level of social and affordable housing build into smaller villages.

The Bill is in line with EU state aid rules, which is very important. The big brother of the European Union is always breathing down on us and this is fully compliant and can be easily funded by the Government and driven as a priority in the years to come.

I also welcome that the Bill empowers the Land Development Agency to use compulsory purchase orders to acquire ransom strips. These were a phenomenon of the early noughties whereby a developer would build 50 or 60 houses and put in a lovely concrete kerb with a 1 m or 2 m grass margin. To most people in the community it meant nothing and it was just a little grass strip at the end of a turning area in a housing estate. It was called a ransom strip because anyone who wanted to develop housing or bring services beyond that point would have to pay the developer or landowner an extortionate amount of money. I am glad that once and for all, although it is too late for some because it should have been done many years ago, there is now a compulsory purchase order mechanism to acquire these ransom strips at fair prices and not at extortionate or rip-off prices.

I have some small concerns about the Land Development Agency Bill and I will speak about these. A big issue in any community is a lack of information. We are dealing with an issue in my village at present. A large windmill has gone up and it is causing much offence in the community. When people do not have information on what is happening in their communities it can be quite upsetting and frustrating.

We have also seen with housing developments where social or affordable housing is planned in an area and residents who have already bought into that road and are paying sky high mortgages are not aware of it happening. Perhaps they were not made aware of it by the developer at the time or by the local authority. Information is vital at all stages. It concerns me somewhat that much of the Land Development Agency Bill measures will allow for a little bit of bypassing of the local elected councillors. This will remove a key section of the chain of command that was always there with regard to local authority housing. There is a need for stakeholder engagement whereby there is not just railroading through land banks in communities to develop housing and that there would be a little bit of stakeholder engagement. I am concerned about this.

State lands tend to be in very large tracts. Some communities have dozens or hundreds of acres, such as the Curragh, for example, where the State owns hundreds of acres. In my community in Meelick we have Knockalisheen. Way back in the 1940s and 1950s it was on land owned by the Department of Defence. It was an old rifle training range for Irish soldiers. In the 1950s or 1960s, and I ask the House to forgive me as I may have my decades mixed up, it became a centre for refugees fleeing the Hungarian revolution. Where I am getting to with all of this is that in recent years it has again been serving a role in providing for refugees. It is the site of one of the largest direct provision centres in the country and it is on State land.

This week, we have heard there is a plan to wind down direct provision, which is very welcome. I have grown up beside a direct provision centre and I know the families. I know that more than anything they yearn for some normality for their children and to be able to integrate into society. This is really good. However, also raises questions as to what will happen with the huge land bank in Knockalisheen in Meelick and other such land banks throughout the country. It is State owned and many of us in the community are concerned that a State land bank such as this could be used overnight for a colossal social or affordable housing development. People are probably saying that I am contradicting myself but I am not and there is a very simple reason for this. Just 100 m from Knockalisheen is Moyross, which is just over the border in Limerick. It is one of those large housing estates, and there are only a few in the country, where the Government has realised that putting hundreds of people in an area that has been economically disadvantaged, and piling social housing on top of social housing, does not necessarily work. It has been subject to a regeneration plan for the past ten or 12 years. We have seen how overdeveloped social housing is a bad thing and a regeneration plan is still playing out there.

Our concern is that just up the road from Moyross is a colossal State land bank, one of the largest in the midwest, where there could be another wave of social housing. It would be only repeating the mistakes of the past. Yes, we need social housing, we need a drive for affordable housing and we need to do everything in the Houses of the Oireachtas to ensure it sees the light of day but we should also not make the same mistakes that far too many made in the past by crowding social housing to the point that disadvantage becomes perennial and inescapable. Good communities are those that are smaller with proper amenities. It goes back to the whole point I have been making with regard to a community becoming sustainable once again with a school, a shop, a post office and a pub. This is what we need to get back to.

With regard to overloading social housing in one area, in many counties if people apply for social housing they get an application form that may have 18 or 19 locations where they can seek houses. It is imbalanced. In parts of rural Clare there is nowhere to get a social housing unit but in places such as Clonlara, Shannon or Ennis there is probably an overload of social housing, perpetuating disadvantage in some instances. The key to this is that it is sustainable and long term. I am not speaking about the little cottages at the roadside that local authorities built in the 1930s and 1940s. We moved on from them a long time ago. There is much logic to going to small villages that are suffering and struggling to survive and saying that developing two or three social housing units in those villages would breed essential new life back into them. We need to get to this model. Despite all the positives of the Bill, and do not get me wrong because I do not want to knock it, it concerns me that we are going on a trajectory of large multi-unit developments on large tracts of land and we could be turning our backs on the small villages where we could be breathing vitality.

All in all it is a good Bill. I hope the Minister and Minister of State will take on board the concerns I have. They are well rooted concerns that are based on my concerns for rural communities that continue to lag behind. In some instances in years to come there will be accusations of a lack of transparency because those who bought a house in an area did not know a new wave of development was coming behind them.

We all know the carnage it can create in a community when people do not have an awareness of things.

I hope the concerns I have expressed will be taken back by the Ministers to the Department. I am glad to have had to the opportunity to speak on the Bill.

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