Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Costello. I wish to follow on from Senator Moloney and speak about housing first. Part of the problem with NAMA is that its job is to keep up the price of property because it is an asset on the balance sheets of financial institutions. It would have been far better for the country if the price of property had been allowed to fall. That would have been a boost to the competitiveness of the country and would certainly have been a boost to those seeking housing.

There is a contradiction at play. I am flabbergasted to hear that some local authorities refused properties offered to them by NAMA. The information was in the newspapers in recent days. That is an incredible situation. We know that many of the 80,000 empty houses are in the wrong place but the ghost estates, as the former Minister of State, Deputy Penrose, used to describe them, are assets. It was the case that some houses in Tuam were sold for €20,000. The jobs are in Galway, which boomed even during the recession. People can make the decision to live in Tuam and have a low housing cost and commute to Galway to work. That is what housing markets do. I want to see that happen. I wish the empty houses and the stock in NAMA had been sold because we need to do something to take the pressure off prices in the housing market. It is contradictory to have pressure on house prices and empty houses within the same commuting distance. It is not a long commute in any OECD country to travel for 30 minutes. The fact that the house one would really like is somewhere else should not detract from that.

We will have to examine social housing provision. A most interesting report was commissioned by Gay Mitchell when he was Lord Mayor of Dublin as part of the Lord Mayor’s commission on social housing. The late Taoiseach, Garrett FitzGerald, was a member, as was the current city manager, Owen Keegan, and Professor Yvonne Scannell of TCD. We all support the Minister in confronting the problem of homelessness and the shortage of housing. The problems identified at the time were that local authority housing cost more than housing on the open market, there was a very high maintenance cost compared to similar open market costs and rents were very low. This led to a policy of selling local authority housing stock. Another problem is that too many local authority houses were built together and that created ghetto problems such as educational deprivation. Let us examine the Garrett FitzGerald proposals to reform social housing so that it does not run into the same problems again.

Everybody complains about the number of closed shops around the country. Many of the shops were recently houses and perhaps they could be converted back to housing use. What is the obstacle? The buildings no longer have a use as shops because shopping has moved to suburban shopping centres where space is provided for car parking. There was a scheme to encourage the provision of rental accommodation over shops. Why not have rental accommodation in buildings that were shops if they have no further commercial function at ground level? We see dozens of closed-up shops in towns. Let us see if we can use the property market to deal with the problem being confronted by the Minister.

The Leader, Senator Cummins, referred to empty local authority houses. One could ask how on earth the situation developed. Let us have local authorities that are proactive when a tenant leaves or dies so that houses do not become derelict and have to be repaired at huge cost. Let us have people moving in much faster than is currently the case and deal with the turnover much quicker than is the case at present.

I am concerned with the view of housing as an asset rather than as a place to live. Assets should go back to being stocks and shares. Gambling on property cost this country dearly. It was indicated to the former Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter, that we need protection for tenants in buy-to-let accommodation. They are not the ones who are going bankrupt or defaulting. When someone buys a buy-to-let property, he or she buys a rent book; he or she does not buy an entitlement to force a tenant out. If the tenant has kept up the rent payments he or she should not come under pressure.

There needs to be some kind of leasing arrangement so they have the fixity of tenure that Charles Stewart Parnell argued for back in the 1880s. It is incredible that we are having to go back to that idea these days.

We have over 200,000 fewer people at work now than at the peak. Most of that burden has been borne by young people. That is why the schemes the Minister referred to are necessary to tide us over. Otherwise, we will have in Europe what is known as a lost generation. I support whatever the Minister can do in keeping people on in school and education. The economy is reviving but at the high-skills level. In an ideal world one could ask for a better match between the firms IDA Ireland brings into the country and the skill-sets of the unemployed. It is very strange that a country with serious financial problems has a development agency that creates jobs which then require people to migrate from other countries to fill those jobs.

I support the Government’s attempts to create flexible labour markets and help us recover from the tsunami that hit the economy in 2008.