Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I notice the absence in the Government benches today. I hope that is because the Members are down supporting the farmers and not intimidated into not attending Dáil Éireann today.

One of the strongest vestiges of our colonial mentality is our continuing to unthinkingly replicate the policies of other nations as though they somehow have things figured out. We think the Finns have the answer to homelessness and that we need to copy Amsterdam's night-time mayor and implement the Kiwis' literacy programme. We followed the Brits in their short-sighted rush to close down railway lines and we built Le Corbusier tower blocks in Ballymun. That alone should remind us that we need to keep an eye on planners and their utopian visions for how other people should conduct their lives. It is a dangerous business to tell people how to live, settle and raise their families, yet planners look down their noses at the dominant vernacular settlement pattern of this land.

Planners and urbanites are derisory of and confounded by the townland formation idealised in Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree", turned into a modernist manual in Jack Fitzsimons's "Bungalow Bliss", whereby anyone, and indeed almost everyone, could build or self-build a home by the age of 25 and clear the mortgage by 40. You could raise a family and they could live around you. The houses in question grew with the people who made them and they were altered and renewed to reflect the changing contours of people's life course. In revising our planning laws, the Minister is recognising that they are not fit for purpose. This House has been messing with the property market since the Bacon report, nudging and cajoling to spur on or throttle down supply and demand. It is hard to believe that we will finally get it right in these revisions. They certainly will not get it right if they do not provide a way back for one-off housing, our vernacular form of settlement.

The key feature of self-built one-off houses was that they were never actually houses; they were always homes. The Minister will probably rehearse the technical reasons that one-off housing is bad for the economy, the environment and society. For each and every technical reason cited against one-off housing, be it sustainable transport and public services or quality water and waste infrastructure, there are various and many solutions that allow us to keep some utility of our traditional settlement formation. The ideologues, behind proper planning, have created told and untold misery in this country, misery in terms of homelessness, deferred adulting, economic hardship, forced urbanisation and not being able to conduct your life in the place where you were born. Their answer of higher density, forcing people to live in conditions that most people in this House would not wish for themselves, has thwarted and diminished lives. It has shoved people into permanent renting for corporate investors. The kicker to all this is that we cannot even provide enough of these ideologically designed shoeboxes. Any reform needs to put citizens back in control of their housing destiny.

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