Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to start by expressing my thanks for being able to make a contribution to this most important debate. At the end of the day, any Government and any Minister for housing will want to be judged positively by the people they represent in providing affordable and local authority accommodation, and having a situation whereby people can afford their own door at a certain stage of their lives, when it is available to them to do so.

Yesterday would have been the late Jackie Healy-Rae's 90th birthday, if we could be fortunate enough to have him still with us. In getting prepared for this debate, I was thinking about the work that he and people like him did on local authorities before ever coming to Dáil Éireann. I thought of the great county councillors and how simplified the housing process was at the time. County councils got money, bought land and built houses. That is exactly how it was. They used local contractors, not necessarily big contractors but, as a rule, people who came from within the county. This created local employment and kept the hardware shops going. The houses got built and after a period of time of their being lived in by local authority tenants, those tenants could, if they were fortunate enough to get the legs going under them, purchase their house. That was great.

I would say to the Minister not to overcomplicate things and to try to keep to that system. We need to ensure that our local councils can build houses, give them to people on the housing list and let those people have an opportunity, whenever it would be prudent for them financially, to buy the homes at an affordable price. That is what I and every other person elected to Dáil Éireann wants, as do, most importantly, the very hard-working councillors throughout the country. I do not want anything we do here in passing legislation and setting up new agencies ever to interfere with what I could call the autonomy of local councils and country councillors. In Kerry, the council's housing department does excellent work, from the director of housing down to the investigating officers and the staff who process the grant applications and deal with the people who fill out forms to go on the list. They do their work in an excellent fashion. Every elected member of our local authority is, to a man or woman, a driven person who wants to represent every part of the county and do good for the people on the housing list.

There are certain questions I have to pose about what the Government is proposing. The Minister knows that I am not one of those people who stands up in this Chamber and says that all Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are out for is to promote the big developers. I believe that is nonsense. Perhaps things happened in the past that neither I nor anyone else would be proud of, but I do not believe that anybody will go pointing fingers at a current Minister and say that this person is all for the big developers. That is a populist thing for politicians to be saying about any individual. If I thought it was true, I would not be standing up and defending a Minister. When I think that a Minister is being blackguarded by that sort of talk, I do not like to hear it when I believe it not to be true. I want that to go on the record.

However, as I said, there are certain things I have to question and nobody can blame me for doing so. I have my own very strong, heartfelt views on direct provision because of the simple fact that in the county I represent, I have met and dealt with many people over the years who come from places where they were not safe to seek protection, our hospitality and to be taken care of in this country. It is right and proper that Governments should offer that protection, but the question is how to do it in the best fashion. We all want to get better and do better all the time. I have seen the White Paper that has been produced, which states that a person who comes to this country will, after a certain period, be entitled to own-door accommodation. I ask the Minister to remember that I am on record as saying that the ideal situation is to process the applications quickly of people coming here, in order that they are not left indefinitely in a particular situation. To me, hotels are a place where people go on holidays or for short-term stays. Everybody knows that is what a hotel is and what it should be. It is not a place for a long stay for anybody.

Having said that, when it comes to people seeking asylum having own-door accommodation, it is stated in the White Paper that they would, or could, have it after four months. How does that marry with the people who are on our local authority lists in Tralee, Listowel, Killarney, Killorglin, Sneem, Kenmare, east Kerry, north Kerry, west Kerry and all of south Kerry? How in the name of goodness can we tell people that those who come here from abroad will get a house after four months but the people living here and who are on a housing list will have to wait seven, ten, 11 or 12 years? Where are the houses going to come from so quickly? I would be delighted if I could be proven wrong in this. I would be delighted if the Minister could say to me that he can do it. However, would he be telling me in the same breath that the young couples and people starting out who are on housing lists and have been waiting for a long time will no longer have to wait? We cannot say one thing to one group of people and something else to another group. If we are able to fast-track the giving of local authority housing to anybody, we should be able to do it for everybody or else we should do it for nobody. I would like the Minister, at some stage, to explain to me and to the House how he can tell people that they will have own-door accommodation, or be entitled to it, after four months. I cannot see where the housing is going to come from in that period of time.

We all have to work very diligently to ensure that young couples who might not be looking for local authority housing at all but might be able to secure loans and mortgages to buy or build their own houses are able to do so at affordable rates. I am sure the Minister is acutely aware of something that has happened in the past number of months, but I want to remind the House of it. I refer to the increase in the cost of materials. The price of timber, steel, concrete and every other material that is used in construction has gone up enormously. I will not bore the House with the statistics but the increase is frightening. If one priced a steel structure, for instance, 12 months ago, compared with what it would cost today, there have been something like five increases in the price of steel and four increases in the price of timber. That is all within a 12-month period and every one of those increases was what I would call substantial.

We have to take that factor into account and it leads us on to other debates such as where we are going with the forestry industry in Ireland that we are importing all the timber because we cannot cut down our own trees and have our own mills milling our timber. That would obviously be at a cheaper cost than importing it from Russia, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, which does not make sense. There are common sense things like this that we must do to try to keep the cost of the raw materials for construction down.

I referred to things that are said a lot in this House about Minsters and big developers. I do not know what people would define as big developers but we should remember that any person who has a building business, whether a big, small or medium-sized business, must have people working for that business. There is no sin and there is nothing dirty or wrong in being a developer or builder. I want to send that message out from Dáil Éireann to the people who are maligned an awful lot. As I said, things might have happened in the past with big developers, big money and things like that, but it does not pertain to the politicians I know today or the developers who are operating today. One thing I do know is that we need builders. We need people with gumption, who have the ability to take on projects and are smart enough to know how to do the finances, employ the contractors and subcontractors and do the work in local areas. That ability does not fall out of the sky. The politicians who are sometimes jumping up and down and criticising those types of people could not organise a tea party themselves. I certainly would not put them in charge of any building project because not only would it fall down, it would not fall up in the first place to fall down in the second place. We have to remember who we are talking about and what we are saying when we are critical about any section of society. To me, builders might be big, medium or small employers but all they are doing is giving jobs to people in local areas and providing a service.

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