Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important issue. It is the issue of the day. Not alone is it affecting young people, it is also affecting the economy. FDI companies in expansion mode cannot deliver housing in the areas where they need it so their workers can have a decent standard of living commensurate with that expected among workers of a global company at local level. This affects Dublin but it affects the regions more. If we have companies in expansion mode and can build houses in the regions, we should be doing the latter. The reason we are not is there are four fundamentals that are wrong.

Our planning laws are wrong. The Minister of State will know there is currently an issue in Loughrea concerning the zoning of amenity land. It will be on the Minister of State's desk one of these days. It should not be on his desk. Rather, it should be decided by councillors locally, as should all local area plans. However, because Government policy stipulates we have to have a core strategy, and because that core strategy stipulates we can zone only so much land based on predicted population increases, we are actually restricting the amount of land we zone and keeping the price high.

Much of the land zoned will never be available. Some of the land we are zoning is being farmed and the farmers do not even know it has been zoned, yet we say that because the zoned land has been designated R1, it represents our core strategy. In this regard, consider the case of towns around the country that have had no private housing built since 2007. Tuam is the largest county town in Galway and there has been no private housing built there in that period. We have had a fair bit of social housing, and some approved housing bodies have built houses, but there has been no affordable housing built. The latter does not work in Tuam because the maths do not work. Planning permissions granted under the strategic infrastructure arrangements have run out because proceeding was not viable. We need to ensure there is plenty of land available and zoned.

Second, we need to address the fact that wastewater facilities are not available where we need them in our towns and villages. The Government has announced a €1 billion package for Irish Water. Three years ago, it announced an allocation of €50 million for wastewater treatment plants around the country. Two towns in Galway were allocated funding but nothing has been done to deliver on the works other than paperwork. That is an issue. We need to have the infrastructure in place if we are to deliver houses where needed.

The other issue that is considerable relates to procurement and the building cost codes. There are so many checks and balances in all our public works that it is no wonder Irish Water is not delivering what we expected it to deliver. It is no wonder TII has reduced and suspended some of the contracts it was supposed to go ahead with this year. The reason is the bodies spend so much money making sure everything is right, they end up not getting any value for money. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the public spending code and the procurement methods we use. To go back a step, we also need to consider the public works contracts for the delivery of infrastructure. They are too confrontational and do not deliver value for money as they should.

Next is the question of how we are going to change things. Policy has to change. Housing bodies can deliver housing and manage it well, with people on the ground all the time managing it, yet our local authorities do not have enough housing liaison officers to deal with the application process or examine behaviour on social housing sites. In one case in Tuam, houses built under a scheme in the eighties were demolished approximately 20 years later because they had fallen into dereliction as they had not been managed right.

The officials in the Chamber should take heed of this. We are building plenty of social houses now. We are getting there, building up and creating momentum. I have no faith, however, that the local authorities in this country are capable of managing this new housing stock, never mind the old housing stock. The new housing stock is different because it has air to water, solar panels and all the mod cons. Who is going to maintain that, make sure it is kept in high order and ensure we get the payback on that investment? More money needs to go into the maintenance of this country's housing stock. Taxpayers' money went into it. Let us not just leave the stock there to fall into disrepair. Let us manage it properly. That is important. If we do not, we are only wasting more money.

Irish Water is a key component in providing infrastructure. If we cannot resource it properly and let it at it, rather than creating a huge number of bureaucratic gateways of approvals every time it needs to do something, we are spending money on time - and time is a cost - without giving us anything. It is very important that we change the head-wreck in all of that. It is important for the simple reason that the young people in my constituency who are working in Galway but living in the east of the county are getting the same wages as the people who live in the city. The problem is that somebody who wants to apply for social housing in the county is on a different threshold from someone in the city. I cannot figure it out or understand it. I do not know why that is. What is the logic behind all of the useless constraints and unexplainable rules and regulations, which are not adding anything, but taking from the whole situation? Housing is the issue of the day in Galway East. I will continue to highlight the fallacies in the policies that are in place at the moment, be it planning, procurement or delivery.

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