Results 11,841-11,860 of 25,858 for speaker:Darragh O'Brien

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: I will answer very quickly and the Minister of State, Deputy Burke may wish to add on it. It was very significant that the legislation passed and is now an Act. MARA, in skeletal form, will be established this year. I expect it to be fully operational by 1 January 2023. It is very important that we have a streamlined planning process to harness the resource of offshore wind for energy...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: Which heading is that?

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: I am just looking at it here. The total expenditure was €2.763 million in 2021. What is the Deputy's question on?

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: That is an overall figure, which was a significant increase on the previous year.

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: I do not have that figure to hand here. I apologise, I am just trying to find it here. Please bear with me for one second. I will say a general point while I am getting that information for the Deputy. We have substantially increased the investment in the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, year on year. There was a very significant increase between 2020 and 2021. If there is a small...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: I apologise to Deputy Cian O'Callaghan but I just want to get an answer for him on his previous question. If he looks at the out-turn in 2021 under rental inspections, the out-turn was approximately €5.6 million. It was significantly below what we targeted for. Therefore, the estimate for this year is €10.13 million, which would effectively be a near doubling of what was...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: A capacity point. Literally, we had a fall off in the expenditure in 2021.

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: Yes but any additional resources the RTB has looked for from me, it has received.

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: Yes, we should be. We will also expand the virtual inspections. I expect more inspections. We want to get to a stage where 25% of private rental properties are inspected on an annual basis. Therefore, we have approved additional staff for the RTB, we approved the workforce plan and we have a new chief executive in place. It is in good shape to do that. If I were to allocate €15...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: I was just answering the Deputy's question. That is fine.

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: No, it should not be, but it -----

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: It will be a substantial increase as well, if we are being honest with people. There has been substantial increase in the level of rental inspections that have happened heretofore in the past two years. In addition, we are using a hybrid method of doing that, where some virtual inspections will be useful but we want most of them to be physical. Therefore, we will actually increase what we...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: Does the Deputy mean between 2021 and 2022?

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: Is the Deputy asking if we surrendered any money?

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: We have taken the full capital carryover that is available and that has been agreed. The Deputy will have seen from the briefing he got that we were able to reallocate funds from capital to current to help with what the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, raised earlier about funding our local authorities through Covid. In the context of the budget, there was a minute surrender of in the...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: Something in that region. We have the full capital carryover of €276 million. We were not unique in that. Every Department on the capital side, because of Covid, had to carry over.

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: The second question is important and I would like to deal with it in detail. Maybe in the next round I can come back on that. I will explain the expenditure piece. Before Covid, we were spending about €168 million on homeless services. The additional funding we gave to bring it to over €200 million were the Covid supports we needed to shield people and provide services. The...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: The non-seweraged villages initiative will relate to that purely. Towns and villages that have existing treatment plants will not apply for that fund. I want to get this up and running. I think it can have an impact. The regular capital plan can apply there. I can talk to the Deputy separately about that. He is 100% right and the affordability measures being brought forward do not...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: I thank Deputy Higgins. I did not mean to sidestep her question. To answer it, the affordable purchase regulations will be published in the coming weeks, in March. Some work is being done on it. The cost-rental regulations have been published already. We need to tell people the parameters within which they need to operate. As I said to Deputy Flaherty, the first home shared equity...

Select Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 16 - Valuation Office (Revised)
Vote 23 - Property Registration Authority (Revised)
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Revised) (10 Feb 2022)

Darragh O'Brien: I do not yet have the final figure. We are just checking through it. Indications for social housing delivery, particularly new builds, is that it will be marginally increased from 2020. Those are initial figures but we need to check them.