Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent)

I, too, am glad to be able to speak on this Bill. I am as confused as many others. We have a desperate housing crisis that we have failed to tackle. We have debate in this House. We have ideology, really, coming from the left and a lack of solutions coming from the centre, which I have always been proud to represent, and the Government parties. Panic has set in. I wish the Minister and the Ministers of State well in this endeavour, but I honestly think we have lost our way. We should not be talking about RPZs here, although there is a need for them in many areas.

Instead, we should be talking about the pressure cooker that is the lack of housing for the young and not so young - many of them are quite old - and the inability to solve the housing crisis. I know it is not simple. I have no ideological hang-up about foreign investment and foreign banks being involved. We need that kind of leverage. The previous speaker mentioned that almost 48% of houses had some Government involvement. That is not sustainable. If we go back to Seán Lemass and how we built houses in those years, we had no AI, none of the geniuses and none of the degrees coming out of their ears that we talk about now. We had plain, common sense and hard graft. We mentioned builders, such as Michael Hally Construction in Ardfinnan. I am sure the Ceann Comhairle had many of them in her constituency. There were many other contractors as well. They employed hundreds of men. Indeed, my late dad was a small contractor and built some houses. Deputy McGuinness might like to know that some of those houses were in Waterford County Council, while others were in Tipperary County Council. He did this as a small set-up and self-employed man. He was able to build those houses for the Land Commission. That is not today or yesterday. It is so difficult now, however. We have completely tied ourselves in red tape, hobby-horses and other views.

We probably had too much zoned land. The previous Government, of which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were part of, appointed a new Office of the Planning Regulator. We never had one before and I do not know if we ever needed one. It is like all the quangos we set up now. They are big organisations with nice, fancy offices and brass plates of their own. It is quango land. The Planning Regulator overstepped his mark completely. Tipperary County Council, of which my daughter is a councillor for the Cahir district, had 60 acres of zoned land and the Planning Regulator put it down to ten acres. The councillors are now grappling with ideas after being told by management that it wants to rezone some of that land again. This is only in the past two years. We are going to have to contravene the development plans that are all made. That is unnecessary bureaucracy that was brought in and resulted in confusion reigning. While there was a need for planning regulation, he went off on a tangent dezoning all this land. Whatever he thought that was going to get him, I do not know. It is a mess; nothing short of it. I do not know how he feels now when the Minister speaks about zoning land. He made his name de factoby this policy and by being a tough man who was going to teach all the councils a lesson by dezoning all of this land. In the past, councils could do what they liked but the Planning Regulator has overruled the whole lot. That was a big mistake. Is he going to be relieved of his post and that office stood down? Obviously, if we are going to completely change policy and rezone more land, it fundamentally makes his position untenable. That is one issue.

Another issue is Uisce Éireann. Most of the towns and villages I know are at capacity. They do not have the funds. These things are costing too much. Uisce Éireann is not fit for purpose. It was set up by elements of Fine Gael under Phil Hogan. It has been an unmitigated disaster. Uisce Éireann is not interested in local knowledge or talking to local people, including the workers who worked for councils for decades and now work for Uisce Éireann. It does not want to listen. It knows it all. That is a bad thing for anyone in any job to say he or she knows it all.

The Government has made the standards of houses unattainable. In actual fact, the standards are unhealthy. I am not a scientist or a medical person but those standards are unhealthy. That have locked up all the people who have gone to work and there is not a breeze going through them. That is fine for private houses if they want, but the Government has decided to have the BER rating. I am looking forward to having an engagement with the Minister at another forum very soon about this issue. Although the Minister can correct me, what I heard from the Cabinet was that the Minister was going to tell councils to ignore the BER stuff and to prioritise getting housed fixed. There is only €11,000 available to take back each void. An amount of €11,000 will not do the windows, doors and insulation, never mind a full retrofit. There is not a smell or hope of that. With regard to the costs of everything, Government policies, especially the carbon tax, have driven up the cost of insulation and meddled with the rising price of oil, which is about to rise again because of what is happening outside of our control. And then there are the BER ratings.

I did not believe the story a man told me when he came to me from Contae Phórt Láirge - Deputy McGuinness’ constituency - approximately seven years ago. He was a single sole trader delivering coal and briquettes and he provided a great service to ordinary people. He explained to me that he was being put out of business. When I asked him what was wrong, he explained that any house that goes back to Waterford County Council, such as when a person dies, the keys go back or for whatever reason, the first thing the council does is block the chimney. That is utter madness. A lot of measures have been brought in. I know we have to heat our houses and not be wasting all of it through chimneys, but we have gone over the top ridiculously. Taking out chimneys is shocking. During the snowstorm last year, people could not boil the kettle in these modern houses. The Ceann Comhairle is not as old as I am. I remember the half doors on many houses. Plenty of fresh air flowed through the houses, yet people lived, had families and survived. They were not frozen with the cold or at the doctor every day sick either. We have lost our way in many areas.

Regarding the whole situation of short-term lets, such as Airbnb, we are going to wipe out an industry. It is an industry. I call it the cottage industry mainly. Many people have farm houses. There are a number of them quite close to me. They are derelict. Big families were raised in them. Nine people went to the school in the morning in the one I am talking about. There was nine of them on the same road. They were a fine family. They are all married and moved off and the farmer has a new house on the land. There is a lovely, thatched house there, which is doing a great job. It is pretty busy. He did it lovely. There are two things in this regard. First, the council decided – I tipped him off at the time because I was on the council – that thatched houses were going to be on the register. That meant that you could not do anything with them and just had to maintain them, but the councils did not give any grants for that maintenance. While they might have given a couple of hundred of euro, that would not pay the thatcher for two days. The lovely restoration of many old farm houses and other houses is at risk. People are petrified. The Government thinks there is a magic wand and that it is going to get a massive supply of houses, but it will not. People will not give them up. They are going to let them go back into disrepair again. That is the rock the Government is going to perish on. Although some people claim otherwise, there is not a magic figure.

Regarding bedsits, I remember there was a big furore in this Chamber, maybe from the left again, about bedsits being terrible because there was only one bed. There was a roof over people’s heads. There were a thousand of them in this city alone. Bedsits were wiped out overnight with a piece of legislation. Many of those people were made homeless as a result. I asked the question whether they were better off in the bedsit, albeit a small, cramped one with everything in the one room? They were happy there and people were happy to provide that service to them. Bedsits were banned because we had to be so upright with all these standards. We could not have these dastardly things anymore. We have to get real and crawl before we walk.

I was raised in a house of nine, including my mother and father, thank God. Three or four workmen were in the house every day. People lived in cramped conditions. When my parents got married, they lived in a room in someone else’s house. Now, however, we want a magic wand to get rid of all the people who supplied those bedsits, the Airbnb and the short-term lets. We are going against what the Government is aiming to do, that is, provide houses for people. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. As far as I am concerned, we have too many advisers and too many people on every radio show and everything else who claim to know everything about housing and how to house people and what to do.

There are basic things we need to do. We must go back to basics. Instead of this Bill, we should treat this as a housing emergency and go back to the State providing houses by stimulating contractors. I am talking about the big REITs and the big outside people who came in and bought all the properties. We should tax the hell out of them because they have done nothing only destroy people. Rather, we should stimulate the local contractor and deal with the planning laws. We should tell the Planning Regulator to take a holiday or send him out to do some other job in the Middle East for two or three years so that we can go back to the basics. We need to keep the zoned land we had. What did rezoning land do? It meant that the land that was left zoned saw higher costs. Kindergarten children would not do this.

We have to call in the Secretaries General of the Departments because they are and should be accountable. They have not been accountable across the board. A couple of years ago, a Secretary General was asked to move from one Department to another. He kicked up and got an extra €60,000. Secretaries General are well paid. They should be accountable. They are the Accounting Officers as well as everything else. They are not accountable currently for costs, waste and the fact that there are voids and everything else and many other issues. We see how we cannot build the children’s hospital.

We do not have a light rail network. We do not have a transport link to the airport, and God knows how many more things. How could we do all of this stuff back in the era of Lemass? There was the likes of T. K. Whitaker and visionaries in those Departments. Now all little fiefdoms have built up and people are all watching their jobs, promotions and space. Governments come and go but they are still there - the permanent government.

If we were serious, we would wipe VAT off houses. Between VAT, planning charges, fees to Irish Water and road charges for anyone building their own house, it is more than half the cost of the house. We would get houses built if we had common sense. We cannot build houses by taxing the people.

There are at least 20 couples in my constituency, some of whom are farmer’s sons and some of whom are not, who have sites and a reasonable amount of savings for a deposit but they cannot get planning because of this, that and the other, and An Taisce and other bodies are sticking their oar in as well. We have all these well-heeled organisations that are wreaking havoc. It is a case of “I’m all right, Jack” and of pulling up the ladder on everybody else.

Go back to basics and put away some of these grandiose powers and call it an emergency. Get rid of VAT and these taxes, not forever but for five years. Do something meaningful.

What happened with the mica? The big businesses - the Minister knows who I am talking about - the block companies or the cement companies should have paid the money there. We added 5% to the price of concrete. What does that do? It automatically adds to the price for everyone putting in a foundation and doing plastering. It is on every bag of cement you buy. We have all these big plans but we forget the little things. If we thought of all the little things, went back to basics and got it sorted, it would be a big help.

We have a great man in Tipperary County Council, the newly appointed director of services for housing, Jonathan Cooney. For a long time, I was the chair of a voluntary housing association, Caislean Nua voluntary housing, but I am the vice chair now. We built 14 lovely houses. We had a public meeting after the horrific beating of a man of 95 years of age. Thank God he is alive. We decided that rather than curse the dark, we would light a candle. We were told we would not be able to build these houses but we negotiated with the council and got the site. Some 11 lay people, not one engineer, not one architect or not one solicitor, built 14 houses. We had to hire all those advisers but we built them. Thankfully, we did it in about two years even though we were told it would take five years. The council was building in the same field and there were four winters with houses with no roofs on them, with contractors going bust and everything else.

Support the ordinary basic assisted housing associations rather than the many big conglomerates that have grown up. There are around 300 of them around the country building 14 or 15 houses. If every parish built ten to 17 houses, that would make a nice dent and the elderly would be happy in their own villages. However, now most villages cannot do that because the sewerage infrastructure is at capacity. When I was going to school, a septic tank was built and it is still there. It is at capacity now and we cannot build anything else.

Councillor Máirín McGrath and her group Positive Steps want to build a special unit for adult children with disabilities but they are caught. They cannot do anything. They have a willing developer and a site but there is no capacity in the sewerage infrastructure. They cannot do anything; their hands are tied behind their backs. We are blindfolded and we muzzled as well. That is the problem we have to break - the red tape, the bureaucracy and the legions of NGOs. Many of the NGOs are costing the State a fortune and are getting their oars in as well. All the fellows with brass plates outside their offices are pushing paper.

When building those houses, the late TD Noel Davern helped us out, and I will never forget when he phoned me to say we had been approved for the money. A couple of stages had to go through the Department. After that, it went to seven different places, between the county council, the Departments of the environment and housing and different offices. It went through all those stages, back and forward, pushing paper. I think that has been cut to about three but it is still way too slow. The council will send something but it will take three to six months for the Department to look at it. It then goes back to the council. It goes up and down and around the houses like the man on the radio years ago who said "Round the house and mind the dresser". I forget his name but he was a great presenter on the radio. That is what is going on and we cannot build the houses.

We are spending and gobbling up the money on all those things. We have created quango after quango. Every time I see something here a new office is set up or a new outfit is set up. Trim down the outfits, cut away the waste and allow the councils to do it. They did it in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The madness came in during the 1990s and in the boom and we got bad buildings. They were very bad buildings and we still have them. With all the regulation and all the standards, we are still getting bad buildings and defective buildings. How can we allow the children’s hospital scandal to go on for this length of time? We need a total re-evaluation.

I am sure there are visionaries like T. K. Whitaker and people in the Minister's vein. I know they have some good ideas, they are interested and they want to make a difference. How many housing Ministers have we had? How many housing Ministers have stood here and said they were going to build so many houses? It is not happening because it is convoluted and we are convulsed with paperwork, architects and design artists. If the county council decided it wanted to build four houses in my village tonight, it would have to go to tender for architects. Surely to God it could have a template for a four-house scheme and it could apply to all the villages. They would have to tweak it to the sites but why do we have to have all that bureaucracy, the appointment of architects and all these stages? We have lost our way.

We need to open our eyes and ears and cut out the regulators and all the regulations. I am not saying to build things without council planning - of course, we have to have planning – but we have tied ourselves up in knots. All the well-meaning things we are doing here will not do it.

We have the left ferociously opposed to the views of the landlords but we need to come together, the whole lot of us. Ní neart go cur le chéile. This is too serious. I heard another Deputy attacking me a while ago saying I never had a policy paper. I have had plenty of policies and I have done the work with other people. I could not do it on my own. They are not even listening to that because they are going nowhere. We need to sit down together on the housing committee. I was on the housing committee for five years but honest to God, I ran off it because if talk and debates would built houses, we would not be short a house. We need action. The time for the words is over. We need common sense above all else.

An focal scoir. Many small, ordinary landlords tell me they are out of the game. What we will be doing with this legislation taking away so many houses beforehand. The magic thing might happen afterwards, or it might not work, but they will flee the market and that is what we do not want. We have the experience with the bedsits. We wiped out a thousand of them with one piece of legislation or a statutory instrument. We thought it was a great idea. People were living in these bedsits. People would be far better off living in those bedsits - many people were so happy in them – than being out on the street, with Fr. Peter McVerry or wherever.

It is time to refocus. That is why it would probably take a national government, although that is not going to happen. We need national imaginative focused development. The Government should start by cutting VAT and taxes and try to accept it is an emergency rather than talking about it. It should try to do something to build houses and allow the people who can build their own houses to build them. They are being nobbled and stopped.

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