Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak about housing. I will first wish the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, well in his position. It is the first time I have met him across the floor. As a fellow coming from the west of Ireland, I know he will do his best to bring houses there.

I will start with the affordable housing scheme. I spoke to the Ministers, Deputies Michael McGrath and Donohoe, about this in committee earlier. The affordable housing scheme as it is currently constructed is not working outside of major growth centres. In County Galway, Tuam, which the Minister of State will know well as our county town, and Ballinasloe are two large towns with plenty of infrastructure. However, the affordable housing scheme will not work in these areas because the cost of building houses is such that intervention by the Government will not make them affordable. I am hearing this from the local authority; I am not making it up. I ask that the Government review the affordable housing scheme to ensure it catches a bigger area.

The second issue I have a gripe with is the fact that, when we are doing our local area plans, the Office of the Planning Regulator has too much influence over what we do in local areas. We are all constrained by what is called the core strategy. In my view, not half enough land is being zoned for residential and industrial uses in our local areas. While we are reducing the amount of land we are zoning, we are increasing the price, making houses more expensive. We should be a bit freer with how we zone our lands for residential purposes.

In my own constituency of Galway East, there are 33 proposals for wastewater treatment plants in towns and villages. Not one has been delivered. This is because Irish Water has no interest in our towns and villages. It is more interested in our cities and centres of population. We are frozen out of building houses in villages such as Corofin, Abbeyknockmoy, Craughwell and Ardrahan because An Bord Pleanála has said that any proposals to build houses in those areas are premature until there is a municipal wastewater treatment plant in place.

At the same time, we are putting pressure on people not to live in rural areas and putting every kind of barrier in place, be it environmental, related to traffic or whatever else. We are muddling all of the plans we have by putting constraints when we should be loosening the reins.

We also need to give far more autonomy to our local authorities when they are building social houses. They will build them faster if they are allowed to build them rather than having to check back with the Department for approval at every stage in the development. This is adding years to the life cycle before we build these houses which are needed.

The Croí Cónaithe scheme is beginning to work and local authorities are starting to get used to dealing with it. A few improvements could be made to the scheme. First-time buyers of a vacant property should qualify for the help-to-buy scheme as well as the refurbishment scheme in order to help them get on to the property ladder and to give them an incentive to buy vacant properties and convert them into homes in our towns and villages.

We need to take a serious look at payments under the Croí Cónaithe scheme. No money is paid out until the house is habitable. This is creating an undue financial burden on people who want to do up an old house. They have to finance thew work first and wait to draw down the money. There should be a structure in place to make interim payments when certain works are carried out to help with cash flow and make the process more attractive.

The private housing sector is the most dysfunctional sector. We are not building private houses and we need to have a serious look at that. A previous speaker referred to the Kenny report. We need to set up an expert task force to determine how to kickstart the private housing market because it is defunct at the moment.

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