Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak. I have waited for quite some time for it.

The Minister's comments about ideology on the left are not helpful and his comments about hysterical Deputies on this side of the room are not conducive to a reasonable debate either. I come from a large family and I have had broad experience within that family. We have had many trades and experienced every side in relation to jobs. My father was a small builder. I watched him all my life working extremely hard, putting in hours when he would price jobs and never get a penny and so on. I fully understand the situation from a number of perspectives. The Minister's comments are not helpful.

Deputy Cowen talked about housing coming up at the last election. Since 2011, I have stood in three elections in February. In 2011, 2016 and 2020, the same issues came up consistently, namely, housing, public health, climate change and public childcare. There were other issues but they were the major four issues. It seems to me they are all intermingled if we are to have a sustainable society. Since those three elections, we have had the pandemic and we have has the mantra repeated in here that we cannot go back to the way things were. That is what the Minister is doing with this Bill. Maybe I am wrong and I will be the first to put my hand up if I am. Maybe there will be appropriate changes to the Bill but I have serious concerns about what this Bill is doing. We are not learning from the pandemic that we need a sustainable society. That must be built on principles of equality. The most basic part of that is that people have homes and that, whether one rents or buys, the price is affordable and related to income, not the market.

I live in the Claddagh, which is a beautiful place. I saw a two-bedroom house recently for rent for €2,000 per month. I do not mean to single out a particular house but that is simply unsustainable. I use as an example a two-bedroom house in Galway city at €2,000 per month. How could that be sustainable? My difficulty is with successive governments, starting with the Labour Party and Fine Gael Government when it introduced the housing assistance payment, HAP, in 2014 and enshrined it as the major Government policy. People were taken off a housing waiting list if they received it and it enshrined in policy that tenants, who until then had paid under-the-counter payments, had to pay over-the-counter payments. The Government or local authority would pay so much, nobody could get a house at a rent that was under the limits and tenants had to pay the excess.

The purpose of every scheme that successive governments have brought in has been to bolster the market. That is my difficulty. There is a role for the market. I have heard various Deputies talk about how we need developers. We certainly do and we need builders, including small builders. I am all for that but that is not what this proposal is about. Let me put this in perspective. I have given one example of a rent of €2,000. The Simon Community has produced its 18th snapshot, Locked Out of the Market: The Gap Between HAP Limits and Market Rents. In the Galway city summary, it states:

There was an average of 62 properties available to rent in Galway City Centre over the study period.

[...]

For the fifth study period in a row ... there were no properties available within standard of discretionary HAP limits in Galway City[.]

[...]

This is the eleventh time over the 16 Locked Out studies that there have been no properties to rent within standard HAP limits in Galway[.]

I could go on but I will not. According to daft.ie, rents in Galway have increased by 4.9%. The report goes on to show that the position in the city suburbs are marginally better. Out of 61 properties, there were three available within the discretionary limits. I have read each report that came out and with each report the crisis intensifies.

Over the three elections I mentioned, the message has been consistent. I ask for a message from the Government that the market will not provide sustainable homes for our people. The market is for profit, and fair play to anyone who can make a profit. However, that profit must be made within a policy set by a Government that says a house is not a commodity to be traded. It is the most essential building block if we are to have a civilised society. That message is not coming from the Government. There are mixed messages, which is confusing.

We have asked repeatedly on this side of the House for a declaration of a housing emergency. We did that with climate change. That has not happened. We have asked for housing and homes to be enshrined as the most basic right in our Constitution and that has not happened. We have utterly relied on the market and it is getting worse and worse. HAP payments now amount to more than €1 billion a year. Every time I mention that, some Minister shakes their head, but I will keep saying it until a Minister tells me I am wrong.

We still have rent supplement. There is nothing wrong with rent supplement but it was a temporary measure. Instead of building houses and dealing with the problem, we did the opposite and enshrined HAP as a policy document. Unfortunately, it was brought in by the Labour Party and Fine Gael. That sent a strong message to the market that, from now on, we would allow the market to house people with insecure tenure, we would pay the rent and when we do not succeed in paying a sufficient amount to the landlord we will put the onus on the tenant to come up with the cash.

I looked at the Bill, consisting of 78 sections, ten Parts and two Schedules, many times as I waited for my chance to speak. The problem is set out at the beginning of the text. It is an "Act to regulate relevant public land in order to increase the amount of land available". There would be nothing wrong with that if we did it to increase the amount of land available for public housing on public land. I might come back to the term "public housing". However, we are doing it "for the provision of housing so as to address deficiencies in the housing market". We are not recognising there is a crisis or that we need dramatic change, as the Minister knows, if we are to face the next pandemic or climate change. We need to have a sustainable approach to housing. This Bill is twisting language to say we will look at public land but leaving numerous escape routes to allow that public land to be used for private housing that will be sold off or rented with no guarantees about who will own it and so on. There are so many questions. If the Minister comes back to tell me that in Galway - or wherever it is necessary, as I am not parochial - there will be public housing on public land, I would be the first to support him but that is not the message being given here.

Many Deputies have mentioned the undermining of local democracy and the Minister has shaken his head and said it is not happening. That is exactly what is happening with regard to the disposal of public land. It is enshrined in section 56. I will not read out the text but it enshrines that councillors will not have a say in the disposal of public land to the Land Development Agency. I would have thought that before putting the Land Development Agency on a statutory footing, the Minister would at least look at what it has achieved to date and what it has cost. It was to establish a registry. What progress has been made with the registry of public land? What does it cost us in rent to have another quango and a CEO? We run down our local authorities all the time. The Minister is shaking his head. The CEO of the county council has moved on to greater things in Mayo. He was acting CEO for five years or maybe longer. We have left the county council without a manager after having someone as the acting manager for five years. Galway has a city manager who has been in office for more than seven years. The only idea the previous Government came up with was to amalgamate the two local authorities in Galway against the overwhelming decision of councillors, who opposed the proposal and argued that bigger was not better. They said smaller, well-resourced and well-staffed was better and they would deliver.

Two reports at the time were in favour of the amalgamation but not before under-resourcing and understaffing were dealt with. Those have never been dealt with.

In addition to taking power from councillors, the Minister also set up a quango in the Land Development Agency. I will stick with Galway because, perhaps, it best captures this. I have never tired of highlighting the crisis in Galway. I will take one aspect of that crisis. I mentioned there are not enough properties for rent and certainly not enough properties within the housing assistance payment, HAP, targets or objectives.

On top of that, however, people are waiting for 15, 16 and 17 years on the local authority list. My regular email to the county and city councils asks that they please explain to me how these people were never offered a house in that length of time. That is one aspect. The second aspect, which I observed with my own eyes and heard, is that from 2009, all construction was suspended in Galway and other areas. As a result, we had lovely quarterly reports in which the final category was "housing suspended". We bought land at a very high price. Programmes for building social housing were all suspended. Not one house was built. On the one hand, the Government stopped all housing construction, while on the other it gave out money under the HAP scheme to bolster the market. Now, we find the market can provide something we knew all the time.

When I read this Bill, I want to thank Dr. Rory Hearne for his many articles on housing. His analysis has been very helpful to me and other Deputies. He talks about looking at housing through the prism of the market and as a commodity to be traded for profit. If the Minister calls me an ideologue because of that, I will take it. I do not believe I am an ideologue. I do not believe I have any ideology in that respect other than that I believe fundamentally in equality. I believe it is right because it makes for a healthy society and a more sustainable economy.

I see no equality here. I see snobbery built into the comments on the Bill and references to undue social segregation, whereby we cannot have too many tenants of the same type in the same area. I have lived long enough to observe Shantalla, the local authority estate from which I come. The houses have not changed. The estate has the same appearance, yet the price of a house has gone up to €500,000. That tells us something about perception and in-built snobbery. What was once a local authority house, and many still are in Shantalla, is now worth €500,000. The railings outside the hospital are exactly the same colour. The estate has exactly the same type of road structure and the same houses, but the price has gone up.

I am really allergic to in-built snobbery I see in the term "undue segregation". Personally, I would not like to live beside any of the men who have been caught up, to put it mildly, with the Davy stockbrokers scandal. I certainly would not like to live beside one of the few bank managers who have been exposed. Segregation works in many ways. I will go back to basics and stay away from the emotion but it really gets to me when I hear that comment.

I would like to see a massive construction programme of public housing that is available for all of us, if that is what we choose. With that, the Minister would send a message that would bring the prices of houses down. The price of my house must come down whether I like it or not. It is simply not sustainable for house prices to keep going up as if a house is a commodity. If that message were to go out, prices would come down and we could then look at building public housing on public land.

We have no master plan in Galway city. I have tried to explain this. I have extra time today so I will dwell on it. We have no master plan to manage our overall land in the city. CIÉ is doing its own thing in Ceannt Station, as are the docks. The Land Development Agency, with Galway City Council, is looking at Dyke Road. We have substantial public lands in all these areas.

The Land Development Agency has been involved in Galway, yet we do not have a report. A task force was set up. The Minister might recall that it took some effort on my part to get correspondence from his Department regarding that. When the Minister shakes his head, I waste my time responding. I ask him, in his own time, to look at how long it took to get these three letters, none of which contains a report showing an analysis of the position in Galway and what is required. They refer to attachments, none of which were provided. The point about setting up a task force is that I foolishly breathed a sigh of relief at the time and thought we were going to look at what was wrong in Galway. I thought we would get a master plan for all the public land but we did not get one.

We have infrastructure deficits in Conamara, in the smaller towns and on the east side of Galway city. This has been mentioned by Deputy Canney and Senator Kyne lately in the Seanad. We cannot have balanced development because there is a lack of infrastructure. For example, there is a shortage of drinking water in Ceantar na nOileán in Conamara because of an absence of progress with Irish Water. We now use Irish Water as the punching bag as opposed to the State setting what is required and insisting that Irish Water do it. We have raw sewage ag dul isteach san fharraige taobh amuigh den Cheathrú Rua agus gan aon chóras athchúrsála i gceist ansin.

We have no infrastructure year after year. I could mention many other things but I will not single out areas. I am singling out the absolute lack of commitment to balanced regional development and an overdevelopment of cities which cannot even cope with what they have. Mutton Island is struggling to cope with the population we have in Galway. We have no sewerage infrastructure on the east side of the city, yet we are now coming in with the Land Development Agency, a CEO, rent and extra staff.

We have systematically undermined our local authorities and denuded them of staff and power. We took away waste management. In 2001, we produced a plan in Galway city in which we stated we did not want an incinerator but put forward an extremely positive proposal. The response of the Government was to take our powers from us. This Government is taking local authority powers in the area of housing without an analysis of what is required. I will give the Minister an example of this with regard to the strategic housing developments. I refer to a very courageous submission on the review of the strategic housing commission by a chief planner in Galway. If the Minister does nothing else, I ask him to read this report from 24 July 2019. The individual in question certainly took their courage in their hands in setting out that the strategic development was not appropriate and used up the resources and time of the staff in the city council and, presumably, all the local authorities, to no avail and without any recognition whatsoever. Let me read one tiny bit of it: “The meetings with the applicant and An Bord Pleanála are more dictate than dialogue or negotiation.” Trust was a problem and it included the use of additional staff, time, meetings and resources. It is a long submission and my time is nearly up so I cannot go into it. I invite the Minister to read it. I also ask him to give me whatever analysis was done by the task force in Galway. I have three letters but no attachments or conclusions from a task force that has sat for more than two years in a city which is crying out for a master plan.

Finally, and this worries me, the docks in Galway are under a company and Ceannt Station is separate. Will those lands be available for the Land Development Agency to consider? Are they outside the agency's remit because the docks have a commercial remit? I thank the Ceann Comhairle. I will not go over my time.

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