Imelda Munster (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This Bill represents failed Fine Gael policy dressed up in Fianna Fáil clothes. The Minister was against this Bill when it came before the housing committee in the previous Dáil and now he is all for it. He claims that the Bill has been fundamentally changed since then but we all know that is not true. The fundamental flaws remain and they were outlined in great detail by Sinn Féin's housing spokesperson, Deputy Eoin Ó Broin, previously in this debate. Section 56 of this Bill will strip section 183 powers from councillors. It will stop councillors being able to insist that public land is used for 100% public housing and that it must be genuinely affordable. That will have terrible consequences, including in my constituency in County Louth. Coupled with that, the Bill will enshrine the definition of "affordable" in law. Unfortunately, the definition will falsely state that "affordable" means below the prevailing market price to buy or rent. By that logic, anything below €460,000 in the Minister's constituency will be affordable.

The Minister's party's response to the housing crisis is to gaslight the nation. We all know that this is absolute rubbish and outrageous but that is what Fianna Fáil, supported by other Government parties, is doing with this Bill. In the real world outside of this bubble, where real people are suffering because they are stuck paying sky-high rents or living at home or in temporary accommodation because they are victims of the crisis, "affordable" means a price for a house that working people can afford to pay.

There might be a place for the LDA but not when it comes to residential property. Local authorities are best placed to manage that. They can deliver public homes on public lands and, when they are properly funded and resourced, they always do a good job and have proven that through the decades. We need to return to the council model of housing and allow councils to provide public housing.

In Louth, we have more than 33 acres of land banks lying idle. The Government instructed the council to buy them at the height of the boom. We need them developed into public housing but we need the council to do that. However, it cannot do it when the Government keeps stripping it of funding and eroding the democratic mandate of councillors. As a result, those land banks are sitting idle, barren of any development of houses, despite the fact that we have almost 5,000 people on the housing waiting list in County Louth alone.

The Minister is stripping important powers from local authorities and handing them over to quangos, developers and the Land Development Agency when all he needs to do is support local authorities to do the job they should be doing, that is, building social and affordable housing on public land. The council in Louth does not even have an appropriate maintenance budget to manage the existing stock. In Louth, if one's windows are broken or one's boiler gives out in the second half of the year, it will not be fixed by the council. That is how dysfunctional matters have become due to the neglect by the Minister and his Department.

If this Government wants to increase the housing supply it needs to keep away from the LDA and increase capital investment for public housing on public land but I suspect, deep down, that the Minister knows that.

I said at the outset that when this Bill came before the housing committee in the previous term the Minister was opposed to it and that he now seems to be all for it. That seems to be a bit of a habit developing on the part of the Minister. That is not the only issue on which he has flip-flopped. I had hoped the Minister would deliver but I have discovered he is good at making promises during election time and then reneguing on them afterwards. I want to take him back to early 2019 when he visited Drogheda, County Louth, as his party's spokesperson on housing. He met his Fianna Fáil colleagues on the election trail but he went one step further than that. He actually called a public meeting on the port access northern cross route. He stood up at the public meeting, giving it welly, and stated that this road needs to be built and that it was a vital piece of infrastructure that Drogheda needs. He said that if this road gets the funding, which he said it should do, it will open up land for development to deal with our housing crisis, get rid of the traffic gridlock that Drogheda is renowned for, help to open up the town centre, take lorries out of the town centre directly to the port and allow Drogheda, businesses and the town centre to prosper. He swore black was white in that if he was in government that is what would be done.

At the start of this week, after three applications by Louth local authorities for funding for the northern cross route, two were refused. We had high hopes. Given what the Minister did - he got his media coverage, his photographs in the paper and the whole lot out of it - I thought he fully understood how crucial and how vital this piece of infrastructure is for Drogheda but, lo and behold, last Monday came the news that he too had refused funding and had reneged on the commitment he gave. He has been only a year in power. He is the Minister in charge. He is the Minister with the purse strings. He has already publicly identified the need for this, but when push came to shove he did what his party is renowned for doing; he reneged on his election promises.

In the Government's Project Ireland 2040 plan Drogheda is designated as a growth centre and there are population targets etc. If one were to take the plan at face value, one would say that if Drogheda is in it and has been identified and designated as a growth centre, surely it must be a priority for this type of funding. No, it was not a priority, which leads me to believe that the Government's Project Ireland 2040 plan is not worth the paper it is written on. I spoke to Louth local authorities yesterday. As of yesterday afternoon, they had no confirmation whatsoever from the Minister's Department as to why the application was refused. Earlier last year the previous housing Minister said Louth County Council had met representatives of his Department after the last refusal and had consulted widely with the Department. He said the Department would engage and assist local authorities in submitting their applications and Louth County Council did consult with the Department. That application has been sitting in the Minister's Department since last May. Despite the number of times I have raised it here and the number of times I corresponded with the Minister, not once did he flag for one moment any weaknesses in the application. Neither he nor his Department ever contacted the local authorities to say there was any weakness in the applications or to say "you may not get this" or "you ought to apply to X, Y and Z". There was nothing, not a word. The Minister kept them dangling there for the guts of ten months after the application was submitted.

Thinking back, I had high hopes, as I said, that the Minister was genuine. Those hopes are gone. I do not know if the Minister has any idea of the anger of the people in Drogheda and south Louth over this. I have not felt such anger for a long time. We have waited for this funding for 15 years. For the first time ever we had a Minister who publicly stated and who benefited from that statement by getting media coverage that this was a vital piece of infrastructure and that if he were in government, the funding would be granted. What did he do then? He turned his back on them. I ask him to overturn this decision, given that we have been 15 years in the waiting. In addition, is there an appeals process whereby the local authorities can appeal this decision? The northern environs plan is for 7,000 houses to be built in an already traffic-congested town. While 2,000 of those houses have been built in recent years; there are a further 5,000 to go. Does the Minister want to destroy Drogheda with poor planning and lack of infrastructure? Is that what he is about? I appeal to the Minister again to overturn this decision because if he thinks for a split second that I or the people in Drogheda will let this go, given what he said previously and the way he just turned down that application and refused it point-blank, he has another thing coming. Is there an appeals process and will he overturn this desperate decision?

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