Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, is here to listen to us. I am not going to tell him what is wrong, because I think he knows himself what is wrong. There is no point in me repeating what everyone else says. What we must do is look at a few issues and see how we can improve on delivery.

The very first issue I will address is the planning system. I give the Minister the example of Galway County Council, which has just completed a county development plan. The regulator put in recommendations that were accepted and signed off by the Minister. One of them was not to allow the zoning of land at Woodlawn train station where we can build residential houses. The reason is that there is no sewerage facility. If we do not zone the land, we are going nowhere.

The limiting of the amount of land zoned for R1 is resulting in the price going up. Why is there such a policy? If we have more land that people are willing to make available, and it is zoned R1 then we would perhaps get some houses built at a reasonable price because there would be competition in the market for the land.

I am coming at this from the point of view of what I see on the ground. The Croí Cónaithe scheme is in place to deal with vacant properties. I have one constituent who made an application to Galway County Council in August yet the property has still not been inspected. He has had to go ahead and build out what he is doing at the risk of losing the grant. Why is that the case? It is because the council does not have the resources to carry out the inspections. I know the Minister is giving each local authority €60,000 each to put an inspector in place, but that will not solve the problem. When the Minister issues his directive next week or whenever else for rural areas, we will have a significant volume of applications, as people are willing to take it up, but there is a logjam due to inspections not taking place. That is what is happening on the ground. Putting an engineer into the system is not what is needed. We need a full team in every local authority to deal with bringing vacant properties back into use. We must be able to deal in a very economical and quick way with the applications that come in. We have people who are willing to do something for themselves and the Minister has put a scheme in place, so let us resource the scheme properly so that it can function. Let it not be like the retrofitting scheme, which is an abject failure at this stage because only 59 houses have been retrofitted since the scheme was announced last spring. We must learn that there is no point in announcing something and saying we are putting money into it unless we put the resources in place to make it happen. What is happening right now is that the local authorities are being blamed because they are not carrying out the inspections. To be honest, these are the type of issues that gall me when I see them happening because it is not doing anything for the public sentiment for the Government or politicians.

The towns and villages that do not have wastewater treatment plants are currently frozen out of the planning process. In my parish, there is a fine track of land right in the centre of the village of Corrofin that could accommodate retail and up to perhaps 100 residential units, but Galway County Council cannot give planning permission, and neither will An Bord Pleanála because a previous decision made by An Bord Pleanála in 2007 stated that any further development in this village is premature pending the installation of a municipal wastewater treatment plant. We have a situation where the numbers in the schools in the parish are beginning to reduce because we cannot get people into the villages. We have six housing estates in the village and they all have private wastewater treatment plants. They need to be connected to the wastewater treatment system. There is a river running through the village which is part of the tributary into the Corrib. In effect, we have an environmental time bomb. One of these days we will see fish with their bellies up in the water and the river full of sewage. We must get real about this. These are not insurmountable issues. All that is wrong is that Irish Water does not seem to have any interest in the towns and villages that can deliver houses. People will build the houses and they will not be looking for State intervention to build them. The houses will be built at a lower cost and young families will buy them and move into them, rather than putting them all into the cities. We must think rationally about the issue. I am giving Corrofin as an example, but I could give the Minister 20 more, such as Abbeyknockmoy, Craughwell, Laban and Ardrahan. It is not possible to build any houses in these towns in my constituency all around Galway. People have sought planning permission and they have been refused.

On the other side of the coin, if somebody wants to build in a rural area, he or she is being told that the council has to watch out for linear development. If there are four houses in a row, planning permission will not be given for a fifth one. Another issue that comes up is an over-intensification of septic tanks. These are the type of issues that are driving people mad. Whether the Minister likes it or not, we now have a situation where the National Roads Authority, NRA, is the agency dictating who builds what, where and when, because it is restricting every road in the country that it can in order that people will not get to build on them. This is what is happening. Farmers' sons and daughters cannot build on their own farms. It is wrong and we must put it right. We have a crisis at the moment. We must stop talking about all the money that we are putting into it; the focus must be on what is coming out of it. Where are the houses being built and how quickly are they being built? Nobody knows anything about the shared equity scheme in Galway. It is supposed to be the greatest panacea to solve problems, but we have not seen it. What I am saying is that announcements are being made about funding, but nothing is happening. At the end of the day, we are just not doing it right.

We also have a situation whereby the private sector is not functioning either. It is dysfunctional. The cost of building houses is so high that builders cannot get people to buy them, yet the Minister came along and tried to put a further levy on construction materials at a time when it is ridiculous. It is time to take off the gloves and to get at this at the level it is at. Currently, in the private sector we have countless private landlords, who are selling up. In fact, there are 500 houses for sale in Galway and the tenants are local authority tenants on housing assistance payment, HAP, schemes. The private landlords are selling up. I declare a vested interest in that I am a private landlord. People are not interested in renting a property any more because there is too much hassle with it, and they are being demonised for having a rental property. If someone is on a HAP scheme for instance, if the tenant refuses to pay the rent, then the landlord does not get paid either and the State might have a free run for perhaps two years until the person can be removed from the house. There are a lot of ills, and we must start to rectify them.

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