Sean Barrett (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Penrose, to the House and wish him every success in dealing with this problem, which is literally a blot on the landscape. It is a testament to how we got into this situation. The effects can be seen in every county of reckless lending by financial institutions, more so in the western part of the country, and of a building industry which expected property prices to rise by 20% per annum ad infinitum, which could not happen.

This problem should be taken away altogether from the banks. The Minister of State has to deal with the physical problem on the ground, as he sees it. The prices of these properties should be allowed to fall as low as possible until we find some other uses for them. We are not propping up the value of pension funds, bank shares or NAMA either. I hope NAMA has a short life and I do not want it to hang around as the Land Commission did, giving out land for 114 years from 1885 until the late 1990s. NAMA must come to an end quickly. If we got these houses on the market at very low prices, which is all most of them are worth, it would immediately improve the competitiveness of the Irish economy in that workers would be spending a much smaller proportion of their budgets on housing than they were at the peak of the boom, when house prices were high.

Is there leeway in the plan for the Minister of State under the planning Acts to get planning permission to complete X number of houses rather than leaving, as Senator Keane said, so many half-finished houses? Could the position of half-finished houses be approached under dangerous and derelict buildings legislation, of which I am sure the Minister of State's Department has adequate supply? This would mean we would get these houses at whatever the knock-down price is. Perhaps we should have some auctions just to see what the knock-down price is and get these houses lived in at low cost. I agree with Senator Keane that the last thing we should do is consider knocking any of them down.

The builders and bankers will have to realise they will not get their money back on these properties because they were built with such vastly unrealistic expectations. We need a market in which the price of these properties and sites falls to some level at which there will be activity, including, as the Minister of State said, social housing and bargain houses for young people. Perhaps they are in out-of-the-way or inconvenient places but if the price is low enough, they will be taken up.

I ask the Minister of State to consider measures such as changes of ownership where people are sitting on assets and almost trying to have a battle of wits with the Minister of State so that it is necessary to acquire ownership at some notional price based on the peak of the boom. We should have the power to acquire at current prices sites and buildings that are not being completed.

Ireland must lose its property fixation. Unfortunately, many of the tax breaks will take a long time to run out of our tax system but we must never again get into that property fixation, which, by the way, deprives the Exchequer of badly needed tax receipts at this stage. If we can get some market price for these properties and sell them subject to completion requirements in accordance with planning laws, they can fulfil a valuable role up and down the country and not be the kind of dereliction Senators Wilson and Keane spoke about, which is literally a blot on the landscape.