Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

There are many different factors in the housing shortage and homelessness issue confronting us at present, but one I want to particularly emphasise is one which I do not see echoed anywhere in any of the Government statements thus far, and I hope it will be looked on and some attention given to it. One of the major problems we face is housing and rebuilding the city of Dublin. That is where the major problems exist. People will say I am taking a Dublin-centred view of the matter but homelessness and the pressure on rents, land values and the like in Dublin are probably the most acute in the country. The Ballymun regeneration plan was not a success. It was an exercise in town planning by Dublin City Council which has not succeeded. Although the problems in old Ballymun such as they were have been addressed to some extent, Ballymun is not now functioning as a new quarter in which to live in Dublin successfully. Retail units are boarded up. It is not working. The message I took from that is that it is all very well for Dublin City Council to look at its own estate, for instance, Charlemont Street, Dolphin House, O'Devaney Gardens or other places, and say that they can be redeveloped and that it has plans for them. It is all very well to do that, but concentrating only on publicly owned lands and decaying public housing projects is not the answer to getting Dublin to function as a city. We need a body - I believe Dublin City Council cannot do it for various reasons to which I will return - the job of which will be to regenerate the entire city of Dublin, to look at entire blocks, precincts, neighbourhoods, places where there is dereliction and places where the density in housing is far too low and to come up with plans such as the wide street commissioners did in the 18th century to plan out new streets, new developments and plan for the social infrastructure that is in place. That is what is needed now. We have the schools, theatres, shopping precincts and all the rest of it in Dublin, yet I saw in one of today's newspapers a major development by the Hines company planned for Cherrywood. It is building a whole new town with hundreds upon hundreds of apartments, which it will keep under its control, running to thousands of dwellings. That is all very well but where we need regeneration is in the city. Putting people out in Abbottstown or at the end of the Luas line is not the way to rebuild Dublin.

The second point I want to make is that private property rights under the Constitution are no barrier whatsoever to the kind of thing I am talking about. The third point I want to make is that no decent city such as Paris or wherever was ever built entirely by leaving it to market forces. I have no problem with the Government looking at the land that is most easily available and going for the low hanging fruit in the midst of a crisis, going for lands like the Glass Bottle Company site and for space that seems to be derelict, but if we want to address the problems of Dublin as a city, we need an urban regeneration body for Dublin. We need a process whereby people can be compulsorily bought out and entire parts of Dublin city can be redeveloped to a different standard and to different models.

I will return to the point of why Ballymun regeneration was such a failure. Dublin City Council had all the powers, owned all the land, had all the opportunity to rebuild a successful suburb in Dublin. It is depressing to look at how much of a failure it was. I have always been sceptical about Dublin City Council's capacity to plan anything. We should remember that Charlemont Street flats, which Senator Humphreys and the Minister visited the other day, were built in my lifetime and they are being knocked down now. Who were the geniuses who put them up to knock them down? I believe I am younger than Dolphin House but not much younger than it. Those were all built within two generations and they are all being knocked down now. Dublin City Council's own head office is a monument to appalling planning. Ballymun is a monument to its failure. We need something other than Dublin City Council to plan and implement a regeneration of Dublin city.

It is important for the development of this country that Dublin should be regenerated at its heart. If we want the IFSC to function properly as a capital city and to bring in people to live in Dublin, we cannot have a situation where a person who is contemplating coming to Dublin to live has to fork out €1 million for a fairly modest house close to their place of work. The success of this country depends on somebody with a vision taking a look at Dublin and saying this is how the city will be developed over the next ten, 15, 20 or 30 years. That is not being done, and will not be done.

The Minister correctly called in all the city managers and asked them for progress reports. I hope he laid down the law to them in private, namely, that they had to do more. They engage in the usually bellyache that they have no resources. Resources are not the problem. The resources will come. If we have a regeneration body which can parcel out land and give building leases, the resources are not the problem. Resources, for instance, were not the problem in Charlemont Street where the Minister visited recently. Resources will come and society has to decide whether it will have X% or Y% of new developments, social and affordable housing or purely social housing. Those are resource issues but they are not the reason nothing is happening, and they are certainly not the reason so much of Dublin is run down, derelict and under-developed. The one body whose job it was to make sure that did not happen is Dublin City Council. It is ironic that it is the owners of all the worst areas in the city and that they are the people whose plans and developments in the past have been the shortest in terms of their duration and the worst in terms of their social outcome.