Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for using its Private Members' time to table this motion. Over the past week, the housing crisis has come back to front and centre on the political agenda. We have had much debate about cuckoo funds, vulture funds and housing policy. The Minister has said that he is committed to providing family homes - semi-detached or detached houses with front and back gardens, as he declared on air with Ms Claire Byrne last week. The truth of the matter is that all of this is rhetoric. Fine Gael wants people to live in apartments, duplex-type units or terraced housing with no gardens. No one in the House would dispute that our children and our children's children will aspire to live in semi-detached or detached houses with front and back gardens where they can rear their families in a reasonable space. This is most people's aspiration for themselves and their families. Unfortunately, the problem appears to be that the Government does not realise that our planning policy, as enunciated in ministerial guidelines, provides for few family homes, and certainly not on the scale of 20,000 that we hear politicians speaking about in the national media.

A most astonishing statistic struck me last week but got no coverage in the media. Out of 16,000 units that received planning permission from An Bord Pleanála, only 4,334 were houses. Of those, only 1,200 were semi-detached or detached family homes.

That is an astonishing figure for a Government that is committed to building family homes. It is extraordinary that the penny has not dropped with either the Government or the media that planning permissions are not being granted for family homes because planning policy prevents that from happening. Last week, it further became clear that the only reason the Government was upset about cuckoo funds was that those funds had started buying family homes.

There are many issues surrounding the supply of housing, including planning policy, funding and viability. Apartments and duplex-type units are not viable beyond the M50. There are many strategic housing development, SHD, permissions that have not been implemented simply because there is no demand for the flats and duplexes for which permission was granted. An issue that seems to escape everybody in this House is that we will have to build family homes to solve the housing crisis. However, Government policy is mostly opposed to family homes. I ask anyone who disagrees with me to read specific planning policy requirement, SPPR, 4 of the ministerial guidelines on building heights, which states that two-storey and own-door houses should be avoided. If we are to have supply of family homes, we must immediately start amending planning policy. We need to allow houses to be developed at ten units per acre beyond the M50. We know for certain that this type of medium-density housing is what our constituents and their families want. It is what planners outside Dublin want. Such development is buildable, fundable and viable.

Fine Gael in government, with the support of the Minister for Finance, surrendered control of housing planning policy to a small cohort of planners who are city-based. It has promoted a policy that forced families into small flats or duplexes and other spaces that are not suitable for rearing families. This was confirmed by An Bord Pleanála when its representatives appeared before the Committee of Public Accounts. They indicated that a mere 7% of the total units for which planning permission was granted were family homes. Has no one in the Government stopped to consider this point? Our planning system is abjectly anti-family homes in favour of a high-density model that was conceived in post-revolution Moscow. The 15-minute city regularly cited by the Custom House as the panacea to all housing and transport ills has never worked anywhere from a social perspective. The policy does not consider its dire social effects.

I commend the councillors of County Cavan who exercised their mandate and rejected this Stalinist, anti-family home policy in favour of a rational approach that will serve their constituents well. I call on all councillors worth their salt in rural Ireland to stand up and be counted and reject the Stalinist housing policy that has been slavishly implemented by Fine Gael in government. If we do not, in the first instance, give people the family homes they want, we will never solve the housing crisis. The real question is whether Fianna Fáil has the bottle to take control of this crisis. To do that, it must amend planning policy now. If it does not do so in the next few months, the crisis will persist for decades.

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