Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to get the opportunity to speak. I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this very important motion. Every week, we seem to have a debate about housing. I am beginning to worry that the debate is mainly about the capital city or the largest cities. Places like Kerry, in particular rural Kerry, seem to be left behind as far as social housing is concerned. There are 171 vacant houses in County Kerry and in Killarney alone there are over 30. There are people who have been on the housing waiting list for 14, 15 or 16 years, which is not satisfactory. The Department is demanding that €70,000 be spent on some of the houses and that they must be retrofitted, yet the Department will only allocate €11,000 for this. If the house has been a void in the past six years and got money before, no funding will be given to it.

The five-year extension for planning was dropped because the Government wanted to force people in Dublin to build big developments of houses, but people with permissions for one-off houses in Kerry lost that five-year extension. Many of them came through the virus and found it tough to get money together to build a house, and they now have to go through the planning system again.

The Government is trying to prevent short-term lets or force owners to rent long term but they will not because they want to have control of their houses, and they are entitled to that. The Government will not get one extra house out of that.

People cannot find places to rent in Killarney. They are paying anything from €1,100 to €1,300 or €1,500 a month and they cannot find a place.

We hear talk from the Government about building modular houses. Will it build them for our own people? The Government is talking about refugees but will it build them for our own people?

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