Paul Bradford (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the intervention of Senator Jim D'Arcy on the housing programme announced yesterday. He introduced a note of caution and realism. While will certainly need to have the Minister of State attend to tease it out with him, I hope we have a housing strategy rather than a strategy for developers and the construction industry. We must reflect on the fact that they are not the one thing.

We all receive magazines every month from various interest groups and we may not always reflect on them fully. We had an interesting magazine from the Construction Industry Federation within the last month, however. I read with interest the comments the director of that organisation made when he introduced the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Paudie Coffey, at the construction industry's AGM. He welcomed and boasted about the fact that the construction industry had its own Minister once again. I want the Minister of State to be the Minister for housing and for housing families, not the Minister for developers and the construction industry. We know what happened with that type of policy during the so-called "Celtic tiger era".

The Minister of State and the senior Minister at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government are fully aware of the housing crisis in the State but the approach to resolving it must be cautious. It must also be immediate. I find it difficult to comprehend economically and socially how there remain tens of thousands of almost completely finished or fully finished vacant houses, some owned by NAMA and some by others, across the length and breadth of the country. Why can we not marry that solution to the housing crisis solution? In a sense, it leads back to Senator Mooney's point about balanced or unbalanced development in the State. Given the housing wastelands in some of our regions, leading in turn to economic wastelands, we should try to front-load some of the new housing budget into finishing estates and putting families into those houses.

We could debate this topic all day. It is something I feel very strongly about and we need to meet with Deputy Coffey on it. While everyone must welcome a plan which sets aside billions of euro, billions of euro were used in the construction industry before and it was not to house people and for families. The money was used to turn millionaires into billionaires and to zone land which should never have been zoned. It caused the economic crisis from which we are still trying to recover. We do not want to repeat that problem. We need a realistic proposal whereby the housing of ordinary people - to use that phrase - is at the core of a policy led by the Government and its housing Minister, not the construction industry or developers.