Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. It is important to acknowledge the work of many groups on the housing issue, in particular the Simon Community, local authorities, the Housing First service and Threshold, and that of the people who work for them on a voluntary basis. It is not an easy issue to resolve. I recall Cork County Council trying to open a wet shelter in the city when I was a member seven or eight years ago. The reason we wanted to open it was the number of people on the street who would not or could not access the Simon Community facility because they would not comply with the rules, particularly in the context of the consumption of alcohol. We opened the wet shelter and I recall the resistance in the local area to it. However, we achieved a compromise and proceeded to open it. That was long before the current crisis when plenty of property was available.

I also recall visiting a centre in Dublin a number of years ago which was run by someone I know well. There were 18 people in it at any given time and they had all been living on the street. It was not a case of moving from the street back into permanent accommodation. They went through a rehabilitation process. Many of them were involved in drugs or serious drinking and the programme was designed to help them to get used to permanent accommodation and address the difficulties they had to go through in adjusting from the way of life they were living. It is not, therefore, a problem that can be sorted out overnight, especially for those who have lived for a long time on the streets.

On the housing issue, we need to examine how local authorities have been utilised and how the available funding has been used. I am not satisfied that money is being used well for local authority housing. There are many unanswered questions, which it appears some local authorities do not want to answer. I tabled an Adjournment debate recently about this. On the one hand, the Government provides money but then we find a substantial delay in the spending of the money to refurbish accommodation and bring it back into use for people who badly need it. It is also strange that it took 12 weeks to restore an electricity connection to a house, which was recently refurbished by a local authority. I raised this at an earlier meeting. The house was vacant for those 12 weeks because the local authority and the ESB have to take ten different steps to provide the connection. That is unacceptable, especially when there is such a demand for housing, and that issue needs to resolved.

Many people want to downsize from three and four bedroom houses and they are pleading with local authorities to allow them to do so. Their children have grown up and moved on and may not even be living in the country. They want to downsize to a one or two bedroom apartment because of the cost of heating and maintaining the house. Local authorities appear to be unable to deal with this serious issue.

Another issue relates to the houses of elderly people who are admitted to nursing homes which are left vacant. Once this happens, they are liable to be damaged. I have come across a number of cases where that has occurred.

The person is not going to return home from the nursing home. There is no other member of the family remaining in the house.

Another situation is where someone dies. Houses might be left vacant for anything up to 18 months or two years after someone dying. He or she was the only person left in the house. The house is surrendered back to the local authority within three to four weeks of the person's death and yet 18 months or two years later the house is still vacant. Those are issues that are within our control and we could deal with them in a faster way. We need to fast-track how we deal with these issues. I am speaking about local authorities throughout the country. The lack of accountability needs to be tackled.

I wish to touch on our housing policy generally. We need to look for alternatives to what we have had for the last fifty, sixty and seventy years. I have raised this issue in this House before. If one looks to Germany, a person can rent a house and the situation is somewhat permanent as the person has the property for 20 years. The person will be on a very low rent, but is responsible for the maintenance of the property. The person provides the furnishings, including a fitted kitchen and bathroom. However, it is possible to borrow the money to do these works, and at the same time the person is in the property at a low rent. We need to look seriously at alternatives that are working across the EU. We have failed to do that. We have stuck with old policies and old ways of doing things. We have not been prepared to look at new ideas. We need to do this and we need to do it urgently.