Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I reiterate what other Deputies have said about it being a disgrace that the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage has not stayed to listen to the debate. This has happened in large part because Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin have changed the way in which the Dáil operates, meaning that now most of those due to speak for those three parties have spoken before Opposition parties such as mine can get to speak. This is despite the fact that some of these guys have an opportunity to speak to the Ministers at their parliamentary party meetings anyway.

Vacant homes is probably one of the biggest scandals of the housing crisis over recent years. It is incredible that right now the Government does not know how many vacant homes exist in the State. Let that sink in for a second. We are in a housing crisis that has been going on for years. Fine Gael has been in government for more than ten years while Fianna Fáil has been in government for the past year and a half and supported the previous Government, yet the Government does not know how many vacant homes there are in this country. We have the highest rents and house prices in Europe. We have spiralling homelessness and people waiting on housing lists. The vacancy element is still not understood by the Government. It is not even that the Government is acting on it to change it; it does not know how many vacant homes exist in this State.

I asked the Minister for Finance last July, when he was implementing his new local property tax, LPT, Bill, whereby he was reforming that tax, whether he would levy a higher tax on vacant houses so we could mobilise some of those homes into use. The Minister said the Government did not know how many houses were vacant and did not know why they were vacant. As a result, he will carry out some investigation or research into this before he will decide whether to introduce a tax on those vacant homes. It is so frustrating to most of the people in the country to listen to a sentence like that, which exudes a complete lack of urgency, and then to look at the housing crisis as it exists for most people, which is a matter of urgency. That chasm between the Government's understanding of the problem and where the people are is incredible.

The Minister is on record as having said he does not believe that a tax on vacant homes will be a game changer. There are no silver bullets in the housing crisis. There are a large numbers of levers that, when all pulled, will have a positive effect on the housing market, and vacancy is one of the biggest of those levers.

The GeoView directory, which was done in quarter 4 of 2020, takes the number of homes that are considered vacant by An Post. It shows that there are 92,000 vacant homes in this State. Some 4.6% of the housing stock is vacant. In at least ten towns and villages in my constituency, streets, including the main streets, are festooned with vacant homes. This is happening at a time people are in crisis. The frustrating part of this is that dealing with vacancy is probably the quickest solution to some elements of the housing crisis. It is much faster to get a home that is 80% built into use than going from design on paper to a complete build of a new home. It costs a lot less to do the job as well. In the context of the Green Party, getting those vacant homes back into use would have the lowest carbon impact. Still there is no urgency on the part of the Government to do this at all. It strikes me at times that the location of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is now more in Dublin than in the rest of the country. Is it because of their lack of understanding of what is happening in the rest of the country that they are slow in fixing the vacancy issue? It is a disgraceful dereliction of duty on the part of the Minister, given the housing crisis.

I had only four and a half minutes to speak on this. I would have loved to have mentioned a lot more, but if there is one thing the Government should set about doing with energy, it is fixing the problem of vacancy because it will also rejuvenate those towns. It will get them back to a vibrancy they have been missing for a long time.

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