Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I welcome the report from the Northern and Western Regional Assembly on vacancy and dereliction based on its analysis of the region. I did not realise Deputy Naughten had written a chapter in the Housing for All strategy but he is correct about the section that deals with the issue of vacant houses. There is a particular need, through a towns first policy, to get vacant or derelict houses back in play and to reconstruct them and enable their reconstruction. There are a number of ways in which we can do that. We can tax vacant properties to incentivise people to get them developed. We can create incentives, which we will, to help people to move towards refurbishing or bringing a house back into use as a home and residential property, which is the desired outcome, as well as creating activity within a town and village.

The study concentrates on towns and villages throughout the north west. I would like to engage with the Deputy to go through it in greater detail in terms of the models used and so on and to identify those houses and see, on a more micro level, whether we can get some of these issues dealt with on the ground.

There has been a range of schemes prior to Housing for All - the repair-and-lease scheme being one - that do not seem to have got the desired return or output.

The interesting news I heard just before I came into the House was that in 2021 there were 30,724 commencement notices. There is significant evidence of the construction sector really picking up. We had two lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 that affected construction output, but there has been such a significant bounceback that we have had 30,724 commencements. That augurs well. It is the highest number for quite a long time. That is part of the approach.

In terms of the rejuvenation of the regions - the north-west being one - we need a targeted, focused policy in terms of enabling vacant houses that have been described in this report to be brought back into use for families or for people generally who are either on the housing list or who are in search of affordable housing. There is a range of measures in Housing for All that can enable us to do that.

In terms of local authority and social housing, since this Government came into office, 5,500 social homes have been brought back into use over 18 months. These would be the typical local authority voids and that is through dedicated funding. Some 1,500 void homes are to be remediated and brought back into use this year. Those are important measures to counter the level of vacancy that has been described in the report. Local authorities will have a significant role to play in this.

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