Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister here to the House today. There are a few items I want to address. First, like the previous speaker, I wish the Minister well in his public service pay negotiations. It is not an occasion for confrontation and it is not necessary to divide the country into a pointless conflict between the public and the private sector. On the other hand, it is an occasion on which we can choose either to loosen the purse strings without a strategy or decide to be careful with what we do.

Let us look, for instance, at the number of people in competitions who want to become members of An Garda Síochána. While I fully accept the proposition that ideally there should be one pay rate for every occupation and there should not be grade A and grade B gardaí, doctors, nurses or anyone else, it does occur to me that the package is attractive. If we ever came to the point where there was a dearth of people applying to be members of An Garda Síochána, that would be a different matter, but it should be borne in mind that where positions in the public service are offered, there seem to be a lot of people interested in taking them up. We should draw some conclusions from that as to whether they are more attractive in their entirety compared with positions outside the public service.

My second point concerns the question of public sector capital investment. There has been a lot of comment one way or the other on this issue recently, but it occurs to me that we need a well-thought through plan to improve the infrastructure in this country. One of my pet issues is the N4 and N3 to integrate the north west into the economic life of the country, in particular to provide a high-quality dual carriageway, if not full motorway, to Sligo, Letterkenny and Omagh, connecting up to the M1 in Northern Ireland. Now is the time to get on and plan that. The Brexit negotiations offer an opportunity to the Government to raise at European level the importance of the cross-Border roadway network, not just on the Dublin-Belfast corridor but on the Dublin-north west axis to Letterkenny, Derry, Omagh and other places. Now is the time to factor that into the negotiations which will take place in the context of the United Kingdom's decision to depart.

On housing, it is undoubtedly the case that in decades long gone by, the State, confronted with the tenement crisis in Dublin, was able to organise a housing drive which was very significant. While it was not perfect in that there was an element of ghettoisation attendant on building vast housing schemes which were all social housing, and while that had some effects on the city of Limerick which were ill-thought-out, now is the time for different approaches to be taken to ensure there are more houses.

When I say this, I hope people do not think this is some kind of right-wing ideology. I have been watching a bit of British television about the buy-to-rent sector there, and I really believe that we are now in danger of seeing in this decade the emergence of a new trend whereby the great majority of people going through their lives are going to be tenants. That has implications for cohesion in society, especially when the landlords are increasingly not going to be one-off or three-off landlords but rather effectively investment funds, real estate investment trusts, REITs, and the like investing in housing for letting. It has implications in the long run for the kind of society we have.

This is not a bourgeois preoccupation. On the contrary, the idea that the great majority of Irish people could aspire to a degree of ownership in terms of capital assets within a country is a good one and we should not lose sight of that. Owner-occupation is not a bad thing. The propagation of owner-occupancy is a good thing and it is simply not enough to talk about units coming on the market, although I can well appreciate that in the middle of a crisis, that view applies. On the other hand, we have to look around a few corners to see what kind of society we are creating. I can certainly see, looking at the younger generation now, that the great majority of them have very little prospect of being owner-occupiers unless there is a radical change in our housing market. Government policy has to address that issue.

When I was Attorney General and was privileged to represent the Government in the Supreme Court when Part V of the Planning and Development Act came up for discussion, the principle of that was that there was to be no ghettoisation and that there was to be a mix of housing throughout the country. Again, from an ideological point of view, it is hugely important that those who are on the bottom of the ladder, so to speak, are not confined to large areas of social housing from which those who are owner-occupiers are effectively excluded. It was a matter of regret to me that that policy, no sooner was it legislated for, was diluted to the point where it just became an economic transaction with no real teeth. We should be mindful of that as well.

Looking around Dublin, the city that I live in, it occurs to me that Dublin City Council is averse to purchasing land compulsorily for the purpose of providing housing. We need something like a regeneration commission which could look at land, assemble sites, have a plan for streets and localities in neighbourhoods and operate, on a semi-commercial basis, the whole idea of land acquisition. This is not a radical idea at all because in the 18th and 19th centuries the Dublin Wide Streets Commissioners did precisely that and all the best parts of the inner city were rebuilt by the commissioners to achieve that aim. I have seen, however, the fright of public servants, particularly in local government, when anyone has suggested they might acquire anything compulsorily. There is a great amount of toing and froing with the Custom House, years go by and the disastrous implications of it going wrong or the implications of all the effort and legal risks attached to it slow everything down. We have to take new and imaginative steps to deal with that issue.