Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak to the Bill. I will preface my remarks by declaring my interest in that I am a landlord and I have some properties we have rented. If we keep demonising landlords who are renting out properties in the way we are doing, we will find we will be in bigger trouble than we are right now. I understand there are about 500 properties in Galway that are up for sale where notice has been given and the tenants are local authority tenants. There is something wrong when that is happening, and it is not greed or anything like that.

People forget that many landlords are accidental landlords. I know of someone who bought a home but had to relocate for their job. They rented out their house to be able to pay their mortgage while they were renting somewhere else. They will not be coming back to the house now because they have moved permanently to another location. They are trying to sell the first house in order that they can buy a house in their new location but they cannot get the tenant out of the house, having been trying for two and a half years. There are two sides to every story and I am not saying every tenant is wrong.

The HAP scheme, as it stands, is totally alienating landlords. If a landlord has a rogue tenant who refuses to pay his or her portion of HAP to the local authority, the HAP office will not pay any rent to the landlord, leaving the landlord without his or her rent and leaving the tenant with a free house that costs the State nothing. Going through the process of notification, validation and all that goes with that can take a couple of years. There has to be a reality check in what we are doing.

Why are we bringing in legislation to ban evictions over this winter? It is a reflection of where we are with our housing. Policies are failing. The Croí Cónaithe scheme is proving to be a major struggle for local authorities. I have been dealing with a constituent who has been waiting since August to have an inspection carried out. He could not wait any longer to get the builder in or he would miss the opportunity to do up a house to live in. He is one half of a young couple.

That is a disservice and it is not the local authorities' fault. They were handed this scheme as a panacea to help bring vacant properties back into use. It was a very good idea, except that nobody asked how we would help the local authorities to manage the scheme on top of all the other schemes we are foisting on them. Next week, or whenever the Minister issues his directive following his announcement at the ploughing championships that he was going to extend the Croí Cónaithe scheme to rural areas, how are the local authorities going to deal with that? How are they going to carry out the inspections? They will not be able to do it. We will have created an expectation, with applications going in, but there will be nobody at the other end of the phone to say when an inspection will be carried out. There will be nobody to say whether the application is right or wrong. We will just have another bunged-up system. If we are real about doing things and putting things right, we have to put money in place to run the scheme and resource the local authorities, if they are what we are going to get to do it.

The Minister of State knows about the next issue because he was notified about it. A housing scheme in my constituency has been boarded up, despite being almost complete, because there is a technical planning issue, which has now gone to An Bord Pleanála for a judicial review Most of the houses were going to the local authority and the local authority itself deemed that the application was invalid. It beggars belief what is going on. I have been dealing with another housing scheme, which the Minister has visited, and it is almost complete. It is a great scheme with beautiful, well-built houses but it is waiting for Irish Water to connect it. That is another fiasco. Developers cannot install the connections themselves. They have to get the contractor that has been nominated by Irish Water, and that is driving the price through the roof.

I had a case of a person who was building their own house and had to bring water 150 m along a public road. This person could not do it; Irish Water had to do it. The cost for doing it was €60,000 for a single house. Let us get real. What is going on is madness and nobody is calling it out for what it is.

Every gateway of approval is being put in place for procurement for local authorities trying to deliver housing schemes. There are maybe seven or eight gateways of approvals. Why not trust the local authorities to deliver the housing the Government wants to deliver and that is so badly needed? Why does it not devolve the money to the local authorities and ask them to deliver it? Every time they look for approval, it takes three to six months. These approvals create layer upon layer of bureaucracy, as well as jobs and costs that are not really necessary. We have to get real about this.

At one time, we had an agency called the National Building Agency, which we got rid of. It was able to build houses and work with the local authorities. It was able to get things done. It had the expertise to do it. We do not have that expertise within the Department or in the local authorities because we got rid of it all. We said we do not need to build any social housing. We need to get something going in terms of a crack unit that will tackle this problem head on, cut out all this trash in the middle and free up the system so we can actually build houses.

There is talk about rapid building and how we build our houses. I can tell the Minister of State now from my own experience that the easiest thing to do in this world is build a house. If we get a contractor on site, we will get a product at the end of it. It is the gap in between deciding to build something and getting to the stage of having a contractor, however, that will take four, five or six years of procurement, reports and whatever else. Let us get real.

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