Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I second the motion as proposed by my colleague Senator James Reilly. This is a huge issue we now face. It was brought home to me a number of years ago when I was calling door to door in an area. In eight of ten houses - one after the other - there was a widow or a widower living on their own in quite good three-bedroom and four-bedroom houses. They were all holding on and not selling because they felt there was the whole issue around the cost of moving and so on. They also wanted to stay in their own local community but there was no alternative there for them.

It is extremely important when we are planning that we put in place the appropriate amount of housing for new couples who want to move into an area and the appropriate planning within the overall plans for retired people or older people who want to downsize. That is not happening. It is not unusual to come across 100 or 200 houses all the same type and size in a housing estate. We are not doing any forward planning.

I come across another issue more and more, and I am sure the Minister of State has also encountered it, where local authorities have to step into the breach to install downstairs bathrooms or shower facilities because these facilities are not available downstairs for older people. It is a huge problem and we need to do more forward planning in this regard.

We need to make housing co-operatives available or have some other mechanism in place for people to downsize without facing any penalties. In Ireland we have a thing about ownership of houses and that one must own the bricks and mortar. Consider the United States of America, where if a person buys in an apartment complex he or she buys a share in the complex and not the apartment itself. If there are 50 units in the complex there are 50 shares and each person owns a share. If the person dies or wants to transfer the share a valuation is put on the premises to see how it will be transferred. In Ireland we have a process with a lot of conveyancing but in that example a company owns the overall complex and a person can buy a share. Senator Reilly spoke about co-operatives. We in Ireland seem to have moved away from co-operatives, but it was a very effective way of managing. It has certainly done well for the entire dairy sector. It was used somewhat in housing but we have moved away from it. There are major challenges and we need to start looking at new ways of dealing with it.

I have a good example of there being no need for everybody to go into a nursing home once they become in any way incapacitated. I know a lady who will be 97 years old in February. She has been in a wheelchair for more than 12 years. This lady lives on her own in her own house because she never wanted to move into a nursing home. She is getting the supports also, but if there are a number of people who have similar requirements it is far easier to service those requirements if they live in close proximity to one another. Currently, one person may need a home help and the next person who needs the help is two miles down the road. People want to have all of the facilities.

In the area of Cork in which I live, Bishopstown, a huge number of people are looking to downsize but there is nowhere for them to downsize to. We are looking at one project where a site has been identified with a pharmacy, a GP surgery, shops and many other services alongside it. That is the kind of facility we need where everything the person requires is in close proximity and he or she is not reliant on additional supports to live a normal life. We need to be innovative in this whole thing. We are doing a lot of building now. There is good news this week that the number of new builds is up to 19,000 but let us not repeat what we did over the past 20 years where we put everything into one compartment and one design and that was it. We have not looked at all sorts of different age groups, and we have not looked at housing requirements for people with a disability. When one considers the numbers of people who are being supported with disability benefit by the State, it shows the demands that exist and why we now need to adjust our housing policy accordingly.

I thank Senator Reilly for bringing forward the motion. It is very comprehensive. The Department should look at it and encourage local authorities to work with private investors because we may need a joint approach in some of these developments. Private companies would be very slow to get involved but we need to make sure we can come forward with new ideas to deal with the issue. Reference was made to the growing number of people who are over 65 years of age. The number of those who are over 85 is increasing even faster, in real terms, and will grow substantially over the next years because people are living longer.

I ask the Minister of State, Deputy English, to take the proposals on board and carefully consider them, and that there would be consultation with local authorities on how we can bring forward positive solutions in this regard.