Kieran O'Donnell (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to contribute to this debate for a number of reasons. First, the second time extension mentioned must be given on the basis that these units will built. I would not like to see this being open to abuse if developers were to seek a second extension and then let their developments sit there for five years. This is not on.

I would like to discuss a second issue currently coming to the fore and I will give an example from my own area of Newport in North Tipperary. There is an estate in the town called Glencree, in front of which is crane that has been left sitting there for the last five or six years. This crane has now gone rusty. Meanwhile the units that were to go into the front of the estate have still not been built, so residents are basically driving through a wilderness to get their own homes. These are people who put down hard-earned money to buy their houses. This legislation has to be used to ensure houses are built. If they are not built then we need to ensure the sites are either returned to green areas or given to someone else to build units on.

We cannot have a situation in which developers apply for a time extension and then get a change in design. This could see a development going from a reasonable standard to something substandard, leaving us with something that looks poor and is essentially the result of the developer looking to make a quick buck.

I know how committed the Minister of State is to building units and houses. There is, however, a problem with the message here. The message needs to go out loud and clear that money is available for local authorities to build social units. It is up to the local authorities to apply for this money and to deal with the matter. We all know of situations in which units that should have been built are not being built at the appropriate speed. A further issue is that the bureaucracy involved in approving these local authority funding applications is taking too long. Whether this is at council or at Department level, this needs to be sorted out. There also needs to be a full audit of all land owned by local authorities. Perhaps this is already ongoing. If these lands can be built on, they should be. Furthermore, they should be built on in a sustainable way. Large estates do not work, they are not sustainable and we do not want them.

The local authorities should, in the main, be building social housing consistently throughout the country. This is not happening consistently. A total of 255 units have been built or are under construction in my own Limerick city area, for example.

My final point concerns private housing. An activation fund has been put in place to open up areas to private development. What needs to be done, however, is to make it crystal clear that this funding will not be available to private developers unless they can give a value as to how much they will sell the affordable units for on the market. We cannot have public moneys going into housing developments without any knowledge of how much the affordable units will be sold for. What is required here, I think is an onus on local authorities to get with the social building programme and an onus on private developers either to put up of shut up. With all these sites lying idle, the developers need either to build the units or sell the land in order that the units can be built at an affordable rate.