Ulick Burke (Fine Gael)

I remind the Members opposite that as we speak, there are more than 50,000 on the housing lists. This situation will probably continue and worsen because more people are going onto the lists.

I have some issues to highlight for the Minister of State. At this time of year, every year, the housing sections and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government know what the allocations will be for the coming year but they fail to notify the local authorities of them. In the case of Galway County Council in the past few years, it was May or June before the county council was notified of the allocation. It is a pity that the best part of the year for house building and construction was gone before the local authority was notified. It would be a very small exercise within the Department to rectify that situation but it would mean a lot for local authority forward planning, tendering and housing output in any given year.

I welcome the commitment by the Minister to affordable housing which is a very important facet of the housing sector. It is probably one of the best schemes ever developed for the provision of housing. Sadly, its affordability will soon be gone out the window. For instance, any couple in an affordable house are outside the interest subsidy scheme if their combined income is in excess of €25,000. Even at the minimum wage, their combined income will put them in the bracket of being too rich to avail of this scheme.

In a recently developed affordable housing scheme in Loughrea, County Galway, 12 of the house owners have asked me to highlight the fact that after one year in their houses and their combined incomes having risen above the €25,000 limit, they are too rich for the scheme. I ask the Minister of State to use a scale and help ease them out of that situation rather than a total cut off. The impact of this will mean that the attractive affordability of the house for a young couple will not be there in the future. This is a situation that must be faced. They are in today and out tomorrow, which is a black and white situation. The impact is very great on a young couple who find it difficult to make ends meet and I ask the Minister of State to consider a scaled down system.

The building industry is very significant but I wish to raise the matter of unfinished estates. Houses are often purchased from the plans due to the great demand. When young people move into these estates, the chances are they will spend about five or ten years in that estate before basic services such as lighting, proper roads, playing facilities or open spaces are provided. Lawns and planting of the open spaces were part of the original planning application but they have been neglected.

Local authorities and public representatives are drained by their efforts to force developers back into the estates to complete them. Developers of local authority estates are also to blame. The community and environment within a housing estate can be enhanced greatly if people have pride in their estate and this is what many residents' groups do. However, this will not happen if they do not have an estate of which they can be proud and if the developer has reneged on his commitment in order to build more houses and has left the estate unfinished.

A very important feature of new housing developments is the fact that most developers and some local authorities insist on the provision of services such as crèches for young families. I was in Tuam two months ago when the first phase of a new housing estate was officially opened. The crèche was the first service provided on that site. I hope all developers could be encouraged to adopt this policy rather than utilising all space for the provision of housing and only providing other facilities if a corner is left over in some part of the site. In this regard local authority estates should also include some community facility. It might only take the space of one house to combine some of those facilities together but at least there should be an indication that the Department is looking at it.

Doubtless some great quality housing is being built under the current throughput where the workmanship is top quality but alas, as is always the case, there are others where the quality and finish of the end product leaves much to be desired. There was a time in the past where in order to qualify for the local government grant, or a part thereof, an engineer or architect from the Department went on site to inspect the quality of work. Sadly, today that is not a requirement in the output of housing. I hope there will be some redress in this area.

Recently I visited a group of students in a new three-storey development in Galway. They were beautifully designed houses but the emergency bells have rung on all sides because the floors on the second and third storeys started to subside, the plumbing and water pipes burst and everything in the house was destroyed. That was all down to faulty craftsmanship and input into the house. For the workmen, it was a matter of get in and get out. Probably there is great difficulty in such cases to monitor what is going on in that many of those major developments by builders are sub-let to other contractors who get in, do their work, walk away and wait for the other contractors to do the other finish fits. While we can say that there is considerable housing development going on in the country, we must query the quality of some of it. It is rushed. The reason for the rush is the quick turnover of resources and finance to get them sold. It is a pity.

Many Senators spoke of design. I compliment the Minister of State's county council which has produced planning and design for housing, particularly rural housing. It provides a flagship to be the copied by all other local authorities. Anybody who has inspected it will confirm this. I was lucky enough to get a copy of it from my colleague, Senator McCarthy, to show it to my planning authority in Galway, which has been persistently saying "No" to issues like timber housing. Such housing can be assimilated well into the environment, if only the authority had the initiative and was pro-active in accepting that these are a quality product.

I pay tribute to my local authority housing section in Galway as being probably one of the finest in the country. If the Minister of State provides the resources and the wherewithal for them to go ahead and take the initiative, and particularly in the allocations to which I referred, then the housing list, which currently stands at 50,000 or more — leaving aside the situation with regard to the homeless — can be very much reduced. In view of this I implore him, in the case the subsidy, that this aspect be investigated as a matter of urgency to relieve the difficulties.