Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is amendment No. 146. This amendment relates to the need to include specific objectives for providing social, affordable and cost-rental housing as set out in the housing strategy. Amendment No. 156 proposes that it should also include a requirement to make specific provision for sports and community facilities. Amendment No. 166 proposes to insert a new subsection to the effect that when considering building residential property, the development of at least 20% social housing and at least 30% social, affordable and cost-rental housing should be promoted. These proposals cover a few different areas.

The point of these proposals, especially amendment No. 166, is that the Government will often talk about housing construction and supply increasing, but the problem is that a huge amount of it is not affordable. When housing is delivered by the private sector, it is not affordable, and because it is unaffordable, it is being bought up by investment funds or big corporations. They buy it all. It is not available to ordinary people because it is simply too expensive for them. Cherrywood in my area is the prime example of this situation. It is the biggest residential development in the country and we are talking about rents there of, at a minimum, €2,500 or €3,000 or €3,500 a month. People are actually reporting that when this housing is advertised by some of the companies who are renting these properties out and people express an interest in renting one of them, the companies never come back to them because it is all pre-rented. I suspect it is IT companies who are renting these properties for their employees. In other words, these companies have taken the whole block for their employees. Do not get me wrong; they need somewhere to live as well. The point is that the ordinary person looking to rent a property has no chance at all of doing so. In any event, the rents are out of most people's reach. House prices, for those trying to buy something up in Cherrywood, are €600,000 to €750,000. By the way, this is happening on a site that had gone into NAMA and was then sold off to all these investment funds and so on, for a song I would say. Mel Reynolds said to me at one time that he reckoned that Hines had probably made a profit before it had completed one unit in Cherrywood because it was flipping the properties on, which is a scandal.

What we are saying is that if development is going to be undertaken, at least 50% of it should be for social and affordable housing and this should be a requirement of any development. I would go higher, to be honest, because I do not really see the point in building units that no one, except for investment funds and big multinational corporations, can afford or charging rents nobody can afford. It is a matter of fury for people in my area to see this massive development happening in a place where there is the most acute housing crisis. People there have been on the housing list for ten and 15 years. There are people who cannot even get on the housing list because their income level takes them over the limit, but there is no cost-rental housing actually available. These people are then left looking at all this massive development, where huge amounts of public money have gone into the infrastructure, including into the Luas, but they have no chance of being able to live there. There was supposed to have been a bit of affordable housing in Cherrywood, but we still do not know how much we are going to get, how much it is going to cost and whatever. There will, of course, be the 10% of social housing, but it is a negligible amount when compared with the need in the area. We are saying there should be at least 50% of the homes for social and affordable housing, with at least 20% for social housing and then the remaining 30% for a mixture of social and affordable housing. It should be a very specific objective in the national planning framework to provide for the social, affordable and cost-rental housing objectives.

On community facilities, I will again use Cherrywood as an example. The official from the council who is the liaison for Cherrywood brought us on a tour around the development recently. She informed us that all this residential development was starting to happen now but then informed us that the developer is now saying it cannot do the town centre and will not do it. This was in the SDZ. The whole basis of Cherrywood was that there was supposed to be a town centre. It was be a ten-minute town so there would be no need to get in a car because you would have the Luas, you could walk to everything, and all the facilities were there, but now, apparently, they are not building the town centre. It is unbelievable, and they can get away with that. There must be an absolute requirement to deliver those community facilities.

One very important one in this regard, and it is a huge problem in our area - I am sure others can speak to their own areas - particularly with women participating in sport, which is fantastic, and there is a huge increase in sports participation, be it soccer, Gaelic, tennis, you name it, is that there are no facilities.

That is particularly the case with women participating in sport, which is fantastic. There is a huge increase in sports participation - in soccer, Gaelic, tennis, you name it, but there are not facilities. There are not clubhouses, changing rooms, pitches, all-weather pitches and so on. There is a massive deficit of these facilities. We need to hardwire into the entire planning system, starting with the national planning framework, that we need those community facilities. We need sports facilities and pitches. We need at least 50% of all the housing to be either social or affordable. Obviously the State has to build its own social and affordable housing but I believe, given the Minister is relying so much on the private sector, that we have to put an obligation on those developments to be at least 50% social or affordable.

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