John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is important, as has been said earlier, to discuss who this Bill is about and who the people at the coalface who will benefit are. I am 30 years of age and it is people in my generation and from my age cohort who will benefit. Those of us from this generation who are still in Ireland today are the ones who did not emigrate in 2010, 2011 or 2012. We are also the generation of people who went to New York and London, did our five or six years there and are looking to come back and set up family life at home. That is what this is about. It is about families and graduates who have the ambition of home ownership.

From listening to this debate, I can tell the Minister that if you were to ask any of my mates to come in here and explain what it all means, it would be difficult. We need to put things in layman's terms. When Members are talking about ideological things and saying what we need to do, a lot of that detail will fly over everybody's heads. We need to be clear on what affordability is. It means we will give people a house and the opportunity to buy it. Again, I am looking back to my mates and people I know and they do not care if a house is built by a developer or a local authority. They also do not care if it is built on public or private land. Normal and average people on the street in Dundalk where I am from do not care who houses are built by. That is a bubble issue and an ideological issue for Members. The average Joe Soap on the street in this country does not care. They want the opportunity to buy an affordable house and they will do so through landmark legislation like this. That is what we are trying to do. That gets lost in the debate on ideology around housing that we have seen rage within our county councils and local authorities in recent years.

I agree with some of the proposals made by Deputy Cowen recently on cutting down the waiting times with An Bord Pleanála. Let us be radical about this. If there is one political lesson to learn from the Covid pandemic over the past 12 months, it is that anything is possible. We can pass legislation in 24 hours and we can change the Constitution, if necessary. Let us take the lessons from the Covid pandemic and realise the sky is the limit for what we want to try to do and that anything is possible. Let us take that approach to housing and be radical about it.

When we look at the local authorities, there is something I believe we should consider. A couple of years ago, Louth County Council was the best local authority in the country for using compulsory purchase orders to take vacant houses and put them back into the housing stock. That is another avenue we must consider when we are looking at reintroducing housing stock. Another thing I would appreciate is the local authorities being given definitive targets when they start building houses. Who is responsible if they do not hit those targets? To whom will the chief executive of a local authority be responsible? When there are certain local authorities flying it, somebody has to be accountable to an Oireachtas committee or to the Minister to explain why the targets have not been hit consistently for the past two or three years. That would be something to consider as well when it comes to local authority housing.

Over the next years in office, this Government has to be radical. It must set clear, definitive targets. How many houses, and not just houses on public land, that normal people will be living in do we want to deliver in year 1, year 2, year 3 and by the end of the Government's term? I accept it when people say my party has been in government for ten years. That is grand, but not a single house was built in this country for five of those years, between 2011 and 2016, when we were trying to get the country out of an economic mess. That is a fact. Nobody can disagree with it. It is disingenuous that the Opposition knows that yet still harps on about a decade of no houses being built.

The final thing I wish to say relates to political ideology. This is where the cynicism of it creeps in. When you see local authorities constantly blocking housing at every opportunity, the higher level of it might be they have a political ideology on it and do not believe in it. The real issue is the cynicism of it and the politics of it. The politics of it is to delay and delay and to make it as difficult and hard as possible to build. It is "Delay and delay, and we will reap the political benefits by exacerbating this housing crisis in the next few years". It boils down to that.