Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this opportunity to speak about the issue of housing. In the few minutes I have, I will concentrate on the serious lack of funding afforded to Irish Water to ensure we have suitable land serviced for development. People are telling me that this lack of resources means Irish Water is becoming an impediment to the delivery of construction and the built environment. Applications for planning permission for significant areas of zoned land in different locations are being deemed premature because inadequate water or wastewater services are available. This problem is compounded by the lack of a programme of work to indicate when these zoned lands will be serviced by Irish Water.

I will give the small example of Athenry, County Galway, which is at the crossroads of motorways. A developer submitting an application in respect of a strategic housing development, SHD, was told by Irish Water two years ago that it would support him. However, when he went to the company to get the letter to bring to An Bord Pleanála he was told it was premature and to come back in 2023 or 2024 when Irish Water would see if it had the network in place at that stage. The last words used were “pending funding”.

We must grapple with this issue and address the time it takes to get quotations and subsequent water and wastewater connections from Irish Water. The cost of Irish Water connections is excessive. People trying to build tell me that Irish Water is being strangled by insufficient funding being made available to carry out the duties we imposed on the company when we set it up. Many projects which were on the agenda before Irish Water came into being have disappeared in areas overseen by Galway County Council and every other local authority around the country.

We must significantly increase Irish Water's capital budget so that it has the financial resources to plan and deliver projects. The utility must prepare a programme of what will be delivered over the next five years and have the money to back it up. Irish Water has the potential to help us to get out of this crisis but the way we are funding it or, rather, holding back on funding it means we are pulling against ourselves.

During the debate earlier today on the Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill, we heard about many of the issues that are arising but one particular problem is the lack of services on sites, especially water and wastewater services. We are not putting the investment in where it is needed. If we want serviced land that is ready to build houses on, and if we want to provide a supply chain, we must start with the sites and make sure they are serviced. At the moment, we do not have that.

We are introducing a lot of legislation and new initiatives and I welcome the fact that we are bringing affordability into housing. I also welcome the shared equity scheme but I cannot figure out how we are going to deliver a sufficient volume of houses over the next five to ten years to meet the demand that exists. Deputies spoke about developers making a killing because the supply is being squeezed and that is what it is all about. Supply is being squeezed and we are squeezing it ourselves with the policies we have laid out and by not providing the resources where they are needed. Supply must be delivered right across this country, in the regions as well as in the major cities, because every town and village has a housing crisis.

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