Maria Byrne (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome; it is good to see him here for this debate. I welcome that he is bringing the Affordable Housing Bill 2021 before the House. As someone who served on a local authority for 17 years and saw houses being built, and not being built and being built again, I am happy to say that in Limerick we are currently building local authority housing. Only in the past two years, 89 units were opened at the top of my own road by the previous Minister, Eoghan Murphy. We look forward to when the current Minister comes down to Limerick to open some houses.In Limerick we are building 15 affordable houses, but for a county with a population of more than 200,000 it is not really enough, so I am delighted to see the Minister bringing this Bill forward.

It is only in recent days I have had two different people on to me whose marriages have broken up for one reason or another, their families are grown up and the family home has been sold. In both cases the wife was looking to try to get on the scheme and purchase her own home but would not have enough money to buy it outright although she would still be young enough to qualify for this scheme. That is something we need to look at. For too long, builders and local authorities left builders off lightly in that they would take the money or move the housing to another part of the city or in the county area and maybe not mix the affordable housing or social housing in with the estate that was being built. Therefore, I am delighted to see there are proposals for mixed units.

I know the Land Development Agency has been active down my way and we have a large bank of land where there is huge potential. It is all publicly owned land but it has been lying derelict for a number of years. The local authority, along with the Land Development Agency, has gone and put the pockets of land together. There is huge potential so it would be good if we could replicate this, and I know it is being done in some places along with the Land Development Agency. It has been said already that everybody deserves a roof over their head and so many people aspire to owning their own homes. In Europe, you see an awful lot of apartments and people tending to rent whereas in Ireland people tend to try to own their own homes where possible.

I am delighted to welcome this Bill and I look forward to working with the Minister on it. It is something we have to drive forward, which I believe the Minister will do, and I wish him well in his tenure.