Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the publication of the town centre first policy. It brings together many of the existing schemes and supports. It brings the town and village, rural regeneration development scheme and the urban regeneration development scheme together into one document. These schemes have been in place and they have been very effective. When I think of my constituency of Galway East, Athenry, Gort, Loughrea, Tuam, Kinvara and a multitude of small villages have been supported and are being transformed with the infrastructure going into them. However, sadly, when walking the new footpath, people still find themselves looking at boarded up buildings. What do we need to do for that?

Page 15 of the policy refers to Irish Water and an investment of €8.5 billion funding package over the lifetime of the national development plan. The Minister of State needs to take some of that money and fast-forward it to put in municipal treatment plants into these towns and villages that cannot develop. I will be parochial about it and refer to my constituency and places such as Craughwell, Corofin, Abbeyknockmoy, Ardrahan and Labane, which are yearning for houses to be built in an affordable way but cannot do so because they are not allowed build by the local authorities or An Bord Pleanála. There is one small little village where six in-fill houses are to be put into an existing housing estate. When I think of what it would do for that village but it has been refused by Galway County Council on the basis that it is supplied by a private waste water treatment plant. Even though it has the capacity and is properly functional, it is not being allowed. The policy is there but the practice on the ground does not make sense.

The policy is missing something, which is how we are going to support people. I am talking about first-time buyers entering the housing market. We are discriminating against first-time buyers who would like to buy a second-hand house and do it up. First, the help to buy scheme is not available to them. That is a major omission if we are trying to regenerate town centres. Then there is the local authority housing scheme, which does not support refurbishment costs to a property and only supports the capital purchase of the property. Again, buying new property is put ahead of buying a property that is vacant. Third, why do we not encourage people by exempting them from planning development levies in town centres and on vacant sites. A pilot scheme could be run for three years to see what the take-up would be. We need to incentivise young people to come into towns and live in them. At the moment we are trying to stop them living in rural areas with daft planning regulations coming down the road. Many people are being refused planning permission in rural areas. Some are being refused planning permission adjacent to the village because they are just outside the speed limit. Crazy stuff is going on. This policy here will not solve it. The planners and local authorities need a talking-to to get things done instead of saying how they cannot be done.

If we are to make this a success, which I hope we will, I point to the fact the North and West Regional Assembly has done an analysis for the Department and we now have a database of 44,905 vacant properties in the north and west of our country. The target for the number of houses we need to build every year is 33,000. If we were to take this regional assembly area as one example, take on board the analysis that has been done and the information that is there and convert that into a conversion rate of maybe 50% over the next three years, we would deliver 22,000 units in existing sites. We must take this by the scruff of the neck. We must ensure we provide supports for first-time buyers. It is okay to say we should CPO a property, and we should do that if somebody will not sell it, but at the moment people are not interested in buying them because it will cost too much money to do the planning permission to comply with building regulations. We need, therefore, to decide to take a simple approach to this. Let us take the protected structure element out of it. Let us see how we can make this a living space rather than a derelict, boarded-up protected space, as that is what is happening. We seem to have converted ourselves over to thinking that if we protect something we are doing the right thing. We are not. We are actually causing decay and rotting our towns and villages through that.

I am very passionate about this. We have an opportunity here. That is beyond doubt. Everybody talks every week and every day and criticises the Government about housing. I do not criticise the Government about housing as it is going to take time to build it. However, we certainly have real potential here with the derelict sites we have. Let us start converting them. Just think what we are going to save in emissions by using existing structures. I go so far as to say first-time buyers should also be given double the grant from the retrofit to help them fit out these houses so they become living spaces. It is not a pipe dream; it is practical. Coming from a construction background, it really frustrates me when I walk and drive through towns and villages all over the country and can spend my time counting how many places are boarded up with a bit of nice bright paint on the plywood. It should shame us all that we are leaving it like that.

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