Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Murphy may not arrive in time as she is running late. If she does not arrive, I will take the reminder of the time.

Housing is probably one of the biggest topics to have come back on the agenda since the advent of Covid in March of last year. I welcome the Labour Party's introduction of this Bill. It is very appropriate we enact policies we believe will make housing more affordable to more people.

I know from my experiences over the past ten years that people who have money have been buying land and property and sitting on it. In the trade, it is called hoarding and flipping at the appropriate time to make a killing without actually doing anything with the land or site. The practice is prevalent throughout the country. People who are cash-rich, such as companies and investors, can do this at will. They can sit on land and wait to see how the market goes. They are speculators. We need to remove that from the whole industry of construction and housing.

It is very clear that, right now, the housing market is dysfunctional. There is no one silver bullet that will solve it. Many things will have to be done. We are getting to a stage where throwing money at the problem will not solve it. We need to have the fundamentals right, which may not get houses built today but will ensure that, in future, houses will be built at an affordable price.

I will raise the issue of our county development plans. When I was councillor, one practice I never really agreed with was the zoning of only a certain percentage of lands in an area on the basis of projected growth. That has created a scarce commodity, zoned residential land, only a certain amount of which is available in every town and city. We have an issue, therefore, when somebody who owns this land can sit on it and command a higher price. We should be zoning more lands in our towns and villages. We have an opportunity to do that now in our county development plans, which are being reviewed. We need to do that to ensure more land is available for development at an affordable price to allow people build their homes.

Yesterday's protests about the mica disaster have highlighted how important our homes are to us, as families, in Ireland. Everybody has the right to live in a home and to be able to live life to the full without being a slave to a huge mortgage.

We need to ensure that people are allowed to live in their own homes in an affordable way.

An issue that has arisen recently relates to construction costs. The cost of building houses or any form of construction is rising. Part of the reason for the increase is that the standards in construction have been upped to such an extent that between 15% and 25% additional cost is being added to the cost of building a house. This is moving the cost of building and the cost of sale very much out of the reach of many people. If additional regulations are being implemented, we need to be able to give supports to people who have the courage to get a mortgage to build their own homes, rather than relying on the State to do it. We have to give them more encouragement to do that in a way that will not inflate the entire market.

A bugbear that I have raised on numerous occasions in the House is that there is potential to house people within a very short time through usage of existing housing stock that is vacant. There are numerous properties in every town and village in which people could be living over shops or developing units into modern living spaces. They are being hampered from doing so as they are caught up in issues relating to planning and protected structures. Assistance has to be provided in that regard. It may be necessary to exempt these buildings from planning in order that they can be developed and we can ensure there are living spaces in towns and villages.

As for the affordability of housing, I have raised many times the fact that Irish Water was set up to provide waste water and water services in order that we could develop housing and other residential communities in a strategic way. The problem with Irish Water - it is not the problem of the company but it is our problem - is that it has not been funded to the extent it needs. I have first-hand knowledge of that in my county of Galway. While I was a county councillor, we did feasibility studies on setting up municipal treatment plants in towns and villages in the county. A site was earmarked for a waste water treatment plant for the east of the county, to be located to the east of the city, to allow the city and county to develop. This was all being worked on by Galway County Council prior to the inception of Irish Water. When Irish Water was formed and put in place, all of those projects dropped off the agenda for the simple reason that Irish Water does not have the funding to put waste water treatment plants into towns such as Craughwell, Abbeyknockmoy, Mountbellew or Corrofin in my constituency, which are growth centres that can feed the city and larger towns. The reason it cannot develop is because it cannot get planning permission from Galway County Council. It has been refused permission by An Bord Pleanála. Effectively, planning in these areas has been frozen out. The contradiction is that many Members are frowning at the idea that people can live in a rural area in the county and every obstacle is being put in their way, be it by Transport Infrastructure Ireland or from a housing need perspective. In some cases, family members are not even allowed to build on family farm land. This cannot continue. We need to address this issue in a wholesome manner.

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