Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this legislation. As others have said, it is a little bit of tweaking to keep us going until next year. As the Minister said, it will allow sufficient headroom to continue lending to mid-2026, after which there could be a new national housing plan and a new national development plan. We know that the €13.5 billion threshold is a holding position. Like the speakers from all the other groupings so far, I will support it - it is extra money - while emphasising that we still need to look at the fundamentals of the housing situation. As this is such a small Bill, this debate gives us a bit more scope to do that. I have six minutes, but if I confine my remarks to the small couple of lines that constitute this legislation I could be finished after one minute. We need to look at the bigger picture. Obviously, the lion's share of this money is going to the AHBs. It is like motherhood and apple pie; nobody can criticise money going to the AHBs because that widens out the funding channels, ostensibly to try to get housing built more quickly. However, I lament the money that used to go to local authorities. More and more, they seem to depend on getting their 10% through Part 8. They are not involved in many major housing projects. My own council, South Dublin County Council, owns a large tract of the Clonburris strategic development zone, SDZ, and is more proactively involved in that. As I said before, any kind of medium-scale housing in the country should be an SDZ because we need to tie in facilities and infrastructure alongside the housing. We cannot look at housing in isolation; we have to look at what sorts of communities we are building.

An issue I have with AHBs concerns the governance side and how they relate to tenants. As the number of AHBs spreads out, as an elected representative it becomes hard to deal with them on behalf of constituents who raise issues. I refer, for example to the stringent no-pets policy that many AHBs seem to have. When a house or an apartment is given as a forever home to someone who has a pet that is staying with a relative while they are in emergency accommodation, and that person is then told that the pet has to go, it is not conducive to family living.

Similarly, and this is not limited to AHBs but is relevant, Government policy in relation to car ownership is ludicrous. We have to get more people out of cars and onto public transport, but many people in SDZs with a lot of social housing, such as the Adamstown and Clonburris SDZs in my local area, have been told that no car parking is available in their apartment blocks. They are parking on footpaths because there is nowhere else to park. They cannot get a bus to where they work. Is it expected that everyone will depend on the State, live off social welfare and walk within a five-minute radius? People must be given the option to get from A to B efficiently. The public transport service is not there. That applies to the local authorities and the AHBs.

I spoke in January about allowing people to build homes in gardens either as starter homes or retirement homes. I am glad to see it was taken up to some degree, although I am still waiting for the finer details. I recall a young lady with a child who has severe autism whose family members are totally occupying the main house.

6 o’clock

The parents work from home. There is nowhere to build other than where they did in the back garden. The building was more than 40 sq. m, so the local authority sent a cease-and-desist letter and told them to tear it down. The situation is that the lady is on the medical priority housing list, which, as everyone knows, is time based. A parent with a severely autistic child who cannot be placed in a lot of emergency accommodation could end up being told to leave their home in the garden and live somewhere else. That does not make sense, so the sooner this legislation comes forward, the better. I am not talking about an opportunity for unscrupulous landlords to make a killing by building houses. There have to be proper rules, but it is one part of the solution, as is, as I mentioned in my budget contribution, the living cities legislation under which buildings can be refurbished. I mentioned the Croí Cónaithe rural towns and villages scheme as well, which does not really cover over-the-shop units but there is a lot of scope.

I reiterate that we should try to get software companies with software localisation jobs to move out of Dublin. Often they have hybrid working systems whereby people can work from home. Although we do not have enough public transport in general and the bus services in Dublin do not have enough drivers, it is good and reassuring to see that places like Thurles will be as close to Dublin city as Greystones if people need to commute to and from work. That will be the case in the next two years, as per recent news reports. There is scope for housing developments and for companies to be located in the countryside, in rural towns and villages, and if they need to access a city centre hub at some stage, it will be within commuting distance. We need to think outside the box and look around.

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