Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The number of vacant dwellings in Ireland stood at 90,158 last year, according to the residential building report. The housing situation in Ireland has been at crisis point for too many years. We need a different plan and a different strategy that actually works. Every single day, my office is blinded by the number of people being made homeless and the number living in squalor. My clinics, which are held on every Friday and Saturday, are bombarded with people looking for homes. I sometimes have up to 50 house queries a week, many of them from people facing homelessness.

There are also huge difficulties when people build on a greenfield site. I know a young family in west Cork with a very sick child. They have moved into their lovely new home but are waiting since last December for a postcode. Such codology. They cannot get a phone or broadband because they have not got a postcode. Imagine moving into a new home and waiting months for that. They are now being told it could be May before they get a postcode. In the name of God, anyone can go on Google Maps, get the co-ordinates, put them into a computer and send out the Eircode postcode. It should be given automatically once planning is granted. The fact that this is stopping people getting a phone connection is beyond a farce.

That is only the start of the problems with planning. People are being turned down left, right and centre for the most ridiculous reasons. I do not have time to go through them all but sometimes I think there is a negative mindset among the authorities, totally opposed to giving a start to any young person who applies for planning permission in rural Ireland. I went out to see a site in west Cork last weekend that was going to be refused planning permission. The application was withdrawn before it was refused. One of the reports said it only had 170 m viewing left and right. I walked 250 m both sides and there was still another 150 m so I do not know what is going on with the planning authority making a decision like that. This was a young man trying to get his life up and running and he cannot do that. The irony of it is that it is affecting the people who have moved to rural Ireland to revive the communities there.

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