Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am not in favour of amendments Nos. 5 and 12. I honestly believe that public private partnerships have worked quite well. Big is not always wonderful and it may be that the problems that arose were on the larger projects. I agree with some of the points made by the Deputies supporting these amendments but I would like to ask whether any of them was ever involved in voluntary co-operatives or voluntary housing committees. Did any of them ever roll up their sleeves and do a bit of work to set up those types of schemes?

I am not blowing my own trumpet when I say that back in 1990, after a horrific robbery of a man, I was part of a group of people who got together to form a voluntary housing association. I salute from the bottom of my heart Donal McManus and other staff on the Irish Council for Social Housing, ICSH, and the people in Tipperary County Council who helped us. We built 14 houses and, later on, a further three for people with disabilities. If every village and community did that, it would be significant. We tendered for the process and we did not have a single expert or qualified person, whether engineer, architect, doctor or professor of any kind. We were all only laypeople with a small bit of common sense and an enthusiasm to get people housed. We confined the eligibility for the housing to people aged over 55 and then the three houses we built later were for people of any age with special needs. They were all lovely two-bedroom houses and the President at the time came down and opened them for us. We tendered and got local builders.

Unfortunately, Deputy Boyd Barrett and others are inadvertently defying and denying local builders, whether small one-man operations with a couple of subbies or the builders with eight or ten people working for them. The effect of some of the amendments they have put forward will deny those people work. I am not talking about the likes of the company involved in the children's hospital fiasco. I am talking about people of and from the community, people with expertise, who have built homes under the private public partnership model. When I was in the local vocational education committee, VEC, that model was used to deliver a number of schools. We waited 30 years for some of those schools and might never have got them only for the partnerships. There is a new school extension project starting now in Lismore in County Waterford, which is only 15 miles out the road from me. It is a massive school that would not have been built only it went to public private partnership. The pressure is taken off the teachers and school managers because they lease the property and the company concerned looks after the light bulbs, the roof and everything else. The teachers can concentrate solely on the education and further advancement of na daltaí óga. We cannot have ideological hang-ups about this. As I said, the Deputies supporting these amendments might let us know how many of them are involved in housing associations and how many houses they got built or were involved in building. We cannot be blaming the might of the State all the time and the big, bad brother.

There are massive logjams, delays and bureaucracy involved in the system. That has grown up since the 1980s or thereabouts. Before that, it was possible to build hundreds of houses in every county each year. The builders had no cranes, massive laser levels or any of the other equipment they have now. They just had the shovel, the trowel, the mortar and the bag of cement. Some of them had a mixer and others mixed the cement by hand. There was no pyrite and none of the effects of mica. There was oversight and there was no greed. I agree with previous speakers on certain points but when it comes to building houses, we must have a dolly mixture. We need a reasonable mix that allows and enables communities and voluntary boards to get the sites wherever they can and build on them.

In fairness, we got our site at a nominal price from the then Comhairle Contae Thiobraid Árann Theas. I have spoken before about the contrast between the speed with which we built those houses and the length of time it took the council to build on the same site. We built the complex with hardly an engineer. We got the help of one engineer, Liam Long, who did a wonderful architectural design and the whole lot of it. There is not a single step in that complex of 14 houses. In the same field, the council built approximately the same number of homes. We built and opened ours in 18 months; the council spent six years building its houses. Three or four contractors went bust in the middle of it and the houses were without roofs for three or four winters. They are 11 or 13 steps - I would not even call them steps; they are obnoxious things - inside those buildings that elderly people have to manage. There is a mix of elderly and younger people living there. There is a lot to be learned from small community and voluntary housing developments.

I agree that some of the large developments, which I will not name, got very big indeed. I very much enjoyed my time as a board member of the ICSH but, in the Celtic tiger times, larger housing bodies emerged and kind of diminished the role of the smaller ones. There was a battle there and, unfortunately, the smaller bodies did not win. In fact, they have a very important role to play in delivering houses. A very good friend of mine, John Simpson in Cathair Dún Iascaigh, is involved in a number of local authority housing bodies. I could name them but I will not. There are many more like him who are building and delivering houses on time and in very good condition. There was rabble talk here today about such builders not finishing houses properly and not snagging them right. They are snagged perfectly. In fact, they are built more quickly and snagged better than other houses and the snag list is attended to by the builders. It is in their interest to have the homes built right, have them maintained and get everything seen to in a speedy time. Somebody might be waiting five years to get small repairs done on a council property, such as a leak in the water tank, with all the damage that does with water going through the pipes. It is very hard to get councils to do that work.

There is a need for balance in this. I cannot support these amendments. The Minister might be surprised but I am supporting him on this because I agree with him. As I said, we need a mixture.

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