John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish the Minister and the Minister of State well in their work. It is a hugely important area and they are going to need all of the breaks and support that they can get in this House and in councils.

When I think of local authority housing, I think of the question I am often asked, which is: why, in the 1950s, were we able to build so many well-structured houses for people who were able to avail of them from the housing list? There was a tenant purchase scheme to allow them to move on in their lives, buy the property and rear a family in it. I was reared in a three-bed local authority house and there were nine of us in that home. We have in recent years built a bureaucratic nightmare that is getting in the way of proper housebuilding. The Government must look at that and take out those blockages. We must ask what the County and City Management Association is doing. What obligations are on it to deliver on the numbers, whether through agencies or directly through the council? What will the Government do to make the association live up to the targets it should be achieving?

In terms of transfers, I have seen people trying to upsize and downsize, elderly people who want to move to a much smaller house because of the cost of maintaining a three-bedroom house, but who cannot get the transfer, not because the houses to downsize or upsize are not there but because the Department puts the onus on local councils to carry out the repairs and to bear the cost of those repairs. We must ask each council how many houses are vacant in its area and what is it doing about it.

We must ask each council how many people on the list want to downsize or upsize and ask it why it is not purchasing four- and five-bedroom houses. Councils leave people without any hope whatsoever in a very small house and have no plan for them to move on in future. There is an issue with the mortgage to rent scheme and getting the final decisions and letters from councils. I speak from experience with my council and my experience with vulture funds, which have no heart whatsoever, no compassion and no humanity. They just want their money. Where a young lady with cancer or a family trying to redeem themselves after the crash are looking to the mortgage to rent scheme and it has worked to the point where the local authority has been asked for that letter, either they do not get it or they will wait months. The vulture funds are quite impatient when dealing with families like that.

In a debate yesterday, I referred to SOS Kilkenny. It is providing houses built for the purpose of housing disabled people. Everything is in those houses and it gives people independent living. The houses are there, but the HSE, which is a reactive rather than proactive organisation, is not providing the names of those who need to be housed in an emergency situation, or indeed a planned situation for life, to SOS to have them housed. That is despicable. Marginalised people, including those who are disabled, should be first to be looked after. The housing authority and in this case the HSE should be forced into action. The section that deals with these houses and the funding of them within the Minister’s Department is quite good. It is excellent. The battle is with the HSE. I ask the Minister to pull all those parties together, including organisations like SOS and the Department’s housing arm and insist they are brought up to speed, react to what is required of them and plan with these organisations.

The tenant in situscheme was mentioned. I do not know why the council will not work on that scheme. The first problem it might have is there is only one person in a house which has three bedrooms. However, there is room for the council to buy that house, there is room for it to downsize that person and there is room for it to perhaps put a number of other people in that accommodation. There are so many schemes there. I do not understand why there is anyone on the housing list and why people are frustrated by the purchase of their homes.

The last issue to mention is the decision around, for example, four houses in Piltown, County Kilkenny. Why that has stuck in the Department I do not know.

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