Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach Gníomhach agus fáiltím roimh an deis cainte ar ábhar an Bhille thábhachtaigh seo. Tá mo thacaíocht ag dul don Rialtas maidir leis an mBille seo.

Is Bille cuimsitheach é agus tá 31 leathanach agus 15 mhír ann. Tá formhór na míreanna sin ag tabhairt tuilleadh tacaíochta do lucht gnó, do charthanachtaí agus d’eagraíochtaí eile ar an talamh. Is rud dearfach é sin.

Tá fadhbanna agam leis, ámh, ó thaobh an dá rud atá curtha isteach ann, is iad, na tacaíochtaí do lucht gnó ar lámh amháin – agus is rud maith é sin – ach ar an lámh eile cuireadh dleacht stampála isteach. Tá sé sin thar a bheith tábhachtach agus ba cheart go mbeadh píosa reachtaíochta ann féin ann maidir leis an dleacht stampála.

I welcome this legislation and also the fact that I have some time to speak about it and do not have to rush. It is very important legislation, comprising 31 pages and 15 sections. I welcome it all.

My first difficulty, however, is the inclusion of provisions relating to stamp duty. Those provisions should be in separate legislation; they should not be in this Bill. I will come back to that and what is in those provisions because I have time to do so.

What is my difficulty with the Bill? There has been no pre-legislative scrutiny, no general scheme published and no regulatory impact assessment published. We are therefore dependent again on a helpful digest on the Bill prepared by the Library and Research Service. Its staff are under strain. They are constantly trying to produce documents for Deputies, and we are all very grateful for that.

I welcome in particular the extension of the EWSS to 31 December 2021 and the extension of the CRSS, but the Minister might tell me why that has been extended only to September 2021. The extension is up to the Minister, but why would we not give certainty at this point rather than waiting? I welcome the enhanced restart week payments under the CRSS. All that is very positive. There is also the new business resumption support scheme. We need to see the details of that, and a committee is the best place to look at that. All these schemes have been very good. I cannot fault the Government on its reaction or the supports given. Where I do fault it is on the failure in analysis. We have people coming to us, such as the various groups that have been mentioned, who fall outside of these schemes, and it is very hard as Deputies to find our way around that. I would have thought there should be an ongoing analysis of whether these schemes are meeting the needs, given the Monopoly money we are giving out, and rightly so. However, there has to be accountability and some mechanism in order that we can see whether the schemes are meeting the needs of the businesses and the organisations on the ground and the additional groups the Minister has highlighted such as sporting clubs and charities.

At some stage we will also have to consider whether we are going forward in a way that is transformative because we have no choice but to do that. Theoretically, we have learned from Covid and learned that there is a climate crisis, so we need transformative action. If those of us in opposition had suggested spending this amount of money before when we were coming up with ideas, the Government would have laughed at us, yet it is able to come up with this money, and rightly so, but it must be with an overall picture. Will we have a more sustainable green economy in the aftermath of all of this? Will we live up to our obligations under climate change legislation? Have we really learned? What makes me doubt that a little is the manner in which the Government this week had to rush through the Dáil legislation, to which I gave my full support, to take away the uncertainty on the ground which arose in Galway. I offer our gratitude to the chief superintendent there who raised the matter. The Government gave a message of an outdoor summer. That message became synonymous with outdoor eating and outdoor drinking, and no thought went into a balancing of rights. That might seem very small, but Galway is a thriving city and the message went out that we wanted people to thrive even more but only as consumers. The message of an outdoor summer did not involve a broader vision. It did not involve support for canoeing clubs, which I outlined the last day I spoke. I am allergic to repetition but it is important to repeat that no support was provided for a real outdoor summer, that is, for athletic clubs, sporting clubs, circus clubs and so on. There is a particularly good circus in Galway that involves athletics but not animals.

Then there was no balancing of rights in respect of residential areas. I and the other Deputies and Senators in Galway were inundated with complaints, and rightly so, from residential areas. In my area, the Claddagh, I spent four hours and 20 minutes one night observing, walking around and going up to gardaí to get them to come down. There was a mixture of reactions from those gardaí, which I understood completely. There were not enough gardaí on duty, they were worried about catching Covid, they could not do anything and they could not stop people getting drink from the off-licences. They went to the point of saying, "This is what you would expect for a summer in Galway", as people urinated publicly in the streets, drank in an out of control way and so on. Most people were absolutely well behaved - that goes without saying - but the Government's message allowed for out-of-control behaviour, with no clear message to gardaí, who were left in a limbo. In religious terms, limbo has been abolished, I understand, but gardaí were left in limbo, not knowing which law they were enforcing or how to enforce the law. They were left to exercise their discretion, which was absolutely impossible.

On top of that, and while I have the time, I will mention again by way of balance that in 2002 Galway City Council passed a Barcelona declaration after a long consultation. That declaration committed Galway city to be universally accessible for all its residents. We were moving away from labels and we had a mantra: good design enables, bad design disables. We were to roll out all our future projects, including outdoor drinking areas, under that overall umbrella of universal access. That was thrown overboard with the message from the Government to drink and eat, giving out money - I think €17 million was the figure mentioned - and telling local authorities to help as best they could to take over public space, but with no analysis and no balancing of rights. While I understand that the Government is under pressure and that there are many powerful voices, at the end of the day we have to balance rights. There was no balancing of rights in the way the message went out. I hope the Government will learn from that and come back to that.

As for the music and entertainment industry, I am on a committee. I do not turn up to its meetings very often but I warned the committee of that from the beginning. I fully support the Music & Entertainment Association of Ireland. It has formed a cross-party committee. It has appealed to us and begged us to use our voices on its behalf at every forum. One of its specific demands relates to VAT. I welcome the provisions in the Bill that will keep VAT at the reduced rate of 9% but they do not apply to the music and entertainment industry. Could the Minister address that? He is more of an expert than I am in this area. This is one practical step that could be taken.

The 10% stamp duty provision should not be in the Bill, it should be in separate legislation. It is extremely important that this be debated. While it is welcome that the Government is now taking a step, it is far from comprehensive and far from what we need. An investor with more than ten houses will finally be penalised with extra stamp duty if they buy ten or more houses in one year. I imagine there will be so many loopholes in this that it will make it ineffective on the ground. However, let us take it as it is for the moment that the 10% will have some effect on the market. We are excluding apartments. Many other speakers have spoken far more eloquently than me about how daft it is to exclude apartments from this on the basis of some forward purchase agreement. It would not be good for the market or for the supply of houses. This Government and previous Governments, with their mantra about the market and their accusing us of being ideological, are actually full of ideology themselves. Their ideology is that the market will provide and that when it does not do so, the Government will provide the market with all necessary supports. When the Government talks constantly about €3 billion-odd, the biggest amount of money given by any Government for housing and public housing in this country, it fails to say that €1.5 billion of that is going directly into the pockets of landlords and in a manner that is keeping prices and rents artificially high. Looking at Galway - I will come back to Dublin - daft.ieshowed that in the first quarter of 2021, the average monthly rental price in Galway was €1,400, an increase of 6.7%. The daft.iehouse prices report, another report, showed that house prices in Galway rose by 11.9% in the year to quarter 1 of 2021.

The Simon Community takes a snapshot of the market every quarter. For the past two years, it has continuously told us that no houses are available to rent privately within the HAP limits or generally because supply is so bad. In March 2021, it reported that there were just two properties in Galway city suburbs and two properties in Galway city centre available within the standard and discretionary HAP limits.

The strategic housing development for the Crown Square scheme in Mervue, Galway, is a build-to-rent housing scheme. Originally, in 2019, it was granted permission for 288 apartments. It recently applied for modified and higher density development, blocks of four to nine storeys, with 345 apartments of which 35 are for social housing. God knows what that means because when I listen to the Government, the phrase "social housing" means anything from the housing assistance payment, HAP, which is not social housing - it is a social support but really is a market incentive - to the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, to long-term leasing. On top of the scheme the Government is bringing in at 10%, it is going to exclude entities or developers that buy up more than ten houses and sell them back to local authorities. It is not possible to make this up. I have described it before as a jigsaw with no picture: there are all these pieces that the Government gives us. They include affordable housing that is not affordable, stamp duty on just ten houses or more with as many loopholes as possible to make the measures non-effective and useless and leasing schemes with no security of tenure, only security of finance for the developer or landowner but certainly not for the tenant.

I thought I was beyond shock and that I had lost that innocence that is somewhere in me that we can change things but yesterday, I read a headline stating:

Nama puts Finglas residential rental portfolio for sale at €14.5 million. Sale of 54 apartments at Prospect Hill offers buyer scope for €1.092m in annual rental income.

The article notes the sale of 54 units is "guiding at a price of €14.5 million". The reason I use this example is that it really encapsulates the bubble that the Minister is asking us to live in and asking us to believe that this bubble is normality. The guiding price of €14.5 million is for units held by NAMA in the public interest and for the common good, presumably. The writer tells us the 54 units are in the "aptly-named Prospect Hill scheme offers the prospective purchaser the opportunity to secure annual rental income of €1.092 million" and goes on to state it is part of a development of 479 apartments. Interestingly, the 54 apartments are distributed across six blocks. It is under-rented, despite the crisis, and "the subject portfolio is currently under-rented with just 26 of the units fully-occupied at an average monthly rent of €1,200", which in itself prompts a range of questions. Why are they empty under NAMA? How many other apartments under NAMA are empty? How many other are empty with other developers? Then, let us look at the delightful rent of €1,200. This delightful journalist tells us the rent is "relatively low". Remember that the median wage is €36,000, and this rent of €1,200 is "relatively low", The Irish Times tells us, "when compared to the rents being achieved across the capital at present". Significantly, the article then states "The remaining 28 units are vacant and ready for occupancy." How long have they been empty? Moreover, it states "26 of these can be let at full-market rent, as they have not been let previously" and "Market rents are in the region of €1,700 a month" and so on. The article then tells us the delightful point for a third time that the basic return per year is €1.092 million. And yet, the Minister tells us that he is seriously committed to affordable housing.

I will conclude. I do not recall having so much time for a long time and I am tiring of listening to my own voice but I have to use it to say that where we used to talk about Namaland in respect of what the Government is doing about housing, this is bubbleland. The State needs to give a clear message that housing is not a commodity; it is a home. In giving that message to the market, it would give a serious message that the State will provide homes whether through developers or, in my preference, through a mixture of small builders who are crying out for work in Galway. There should be an audit of public land, which the Land Development Agency has failed to give us. There is a task force in Galway which has never reported and which was set up because we have a crisis in Galway with people waiting on a waiting list for 15 solid years of their lives. We set up a task force that has never reported. I ask the Minister to look at that. I asked the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage about it and he told me it had reported. He kindly gave me a copy of the reports but they are not reports. Instead, they are only letters that give an outline of when the meetings took place, who chaired them and who attended but with no analysis of the housing crisis and no attempt to give solutions.

Finally, I must take the opportunity to say that Galway City Council has no overall city architect. Let me put on the record that it has very good staff but it has no city architect and no plan for Galway overall in the interest of the common good. It has many developments that are developer-led. The harbour is entirely separate. It intends selling off public land, I would say, to the highest bidder. There is an entirely separate university development in a different area, namely, Nun's Island. There is a separate development that is a mixture of co-operation between the city council and the Land Development Agency in Sandy Road. There is Dyke Road and then there is 115 acres out at the airport. I am only mentioning some of the land and not any institutional public land owned by institutions that might be willing to give it. I look at the Minister and ask, how come no one has taken Galway, even as a pilot project, and asked why there is no overall plan based on the common good? Why would the harbour be allowed to sell off residential land to the highest bidder? Why would the Land Development Agency work with a council to maximise the cost of houses while the Minister tells us, using different language, that he is all about affordability. Kafka is not in it with the Government. Really and truly, the Government excels and when it comes to Kafka, he is only in the halfpenny place.

See this speech in context