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

As several colleagues mentioned, it is important to look at this issue from both sides. We cannot talk about housing without talking about the plight of some landlords. They are not all unscrupulous. In fact, many of them are being very fair. In looking at the housing crisis, we must reverse back to where the mistakes were made and the fact is there were a shocking number of mistakes. There are issues with what was done with planning permissions, with rooms in towns and villages and the doing away with village nucleuses. The roots of all these problems are found in the county development plans. Some of the local authorities, including my own, had a lot of polished but clueless craturs who were drawing up these plans without looking to the future. They made sure planning permissions and opportunities would not be given to young people in rural communities.

We are now planning to build houses and apartments all over the blooming place, trying to catch up many years later. All this negativity was built into country development plans. Areas where village nucleuses were taken from them and areas that were previously designated for development are being cut back. Where are we going? Every time we come up here we are told there is no control over planning here; it is just a case of building as high and as long and as far as we can take it. However, in rural areas there are severe restrictions. Unfortunately, that has led to people feeling they have no choice but to give up. They could not get the banks to back them and could not get planning permission, so it was basically back to social housing for them. Now, there is a real crisis in social housing. I presume it is the same for every other Deputy. There are people coming into my clinics every weekend with letters from their landlords saying they are being evicted. There is a freeze on that at the moment with the eviction ban, but that will not last long.

I also want to look at the other side of the coin in the little time I have, and talk about the situation of landlords. I was talking to a landlord recently who had a tenant who was not willing to pay the rent. The landlord asked me to raise the issue in the Dáil because he felt that perhaps we are hearing only one side of the story all the time. The tenant would not pay the rent, and significant work and cost was involved in getting the individual out of the house in west Cork, with the sheriff and all the other expense and time involved. In the meantime, the tenant was only teasing and laughing at the landlord. The landlord may have succeeded in evicting the tenant, but it cost him a hell of a lot of money. Some landlords can get a bad name. I met a person the other day who told me they were renting their house in Bantry for €800 a month, which is way below the normal rate. The landlord said they had a very nice tenant and they did not want to put hardship on them. There are a lot of decent people out there who are letting houses and are trying to keep good people in their homes, and who do not charge as high a rent as others. Obviously, there are also rogue landlords.

I am very conscious of young people who do not qualify for HAP and are disqualified over small sums of money and cannot qualify for social housing. That is a huge hardship for them. They are falling between two stools, and this needs to be looked at. The cap needs to be raised. It may be that a couple are working and are not on a high income, but still cannot qualify to get on the housing list. This is a very important issue. Other speakers talked about the new funding scheme that was announced at the ploughing championships, which provides for a grant of up to €50,000. That needs to be worked on immediately. We were talking about ruins in the countryside and in villages 15 to 20 years ago and nobody was listening. Now everybody is running around and trying to listen. Unfortunately, the horse has bolted and the Government is standing at the station when it comes to the issue of housing. The way things are going, it will not get any better; it will get much worse.

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