Conor McGuinness (Waterford, Sinn Fein)

The snail's pace at which vacant council homes are being brought back into use is a disgrace and it tells a wider story about the Government's other failure in housing delivery. In communities right across the State we see the consequences of this every day in vacant homes gathering dust while families sit on waiting lists, dereliction, antisocial behaviour and the crassness of people walking past these houses knowing that they would provide lovely homes for their families while they languish on waiting lists and raise their children in their childhood bedrooms.

In Waterford, like other counties, we see projects held back and frustrated by a lack of resourcing for local authorities and crucially, if we are being honest, by a lack of political will from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Take the social housing development in An Sean Phobal that entered the Department's own fast-track process in 2021. It is now mid-2025 and nothing has happened. It still has not commenced. In Dungarvan, an affordable and cost rental housing scheme I proposed back in 2022 has received no approval from the Department yet and no green light. A recent parliamentary question to the Minister's Department has confirmed what I feared which is that those homes will not be ready until 2028 at the absolutely earliest. That is six years later and that is at the best rate of progress the Department can deliver. In Ardmore, a beautiful seaside village in County Waterford which is a victim of its attractiveness, young people are being priced out by short-term lets and holiday homes. Families are being priced out of this and the village is facing a demographic cliff edge because the Government will not pull the trigger and get affordable housing delivered there. I nGaeltacht na nDéise, the crisis is deeper. The community is facing an existential threat. It is not just about supply. It is about the survival of this unique language community. Young families cannot get a home, they cannot set up a place to live, they cannot build a home if they have the wherewithal to do it and the Government has not grasped the reality of that. We are still waiting for the treoirlínte pleanála Gaeltachta, the planning guidelines.

On affordable sites, local authority chief executives are telling us there just is not enough money there to make it feasible for a local authority to develop affordable serviced sites in rural communities. This would provide a space for young families to build a home in their own area when they cannot get planning permission on a site that may be available to them and cannot afford to purchase a site that would have planning permission. It is a litany of failure after failure. Into that context we have the scenes we saw earlier in this Chamber where the Taoiseach had not read the-----

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