Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I want to talk briefly about two things. I hope the Leader might allow us to have a further proper discussion for the whole House because housing comes up repeatedly. What I see in my own county is lots of empty buildings and also lots of people doing Airbnb. I want to clearly distinguish between a person letting out a room in his or her house and one letting out a whole house because a whole house is a potential home for someone to rent and live in. A room in a house is in a person's home so it is a different thing. We have some Airbnb restrictions in Dublin but we do not have any in County Clare, for example.

I know from going around the villages and towns of the county that we have loads of empty houses. There are over 220,000 empty houses in Ireland. We know building houses is going to be tricky because we have not been able to build for a whole year. We must look at the stock that is there and we do not have proper data on it. We must offer a carrot to the owners of these empty houses but we may also need a bit of a stick in the form of looking at the vacant property tax because it is not moving quick enough. There is a housing emergency and we must do much more. The local authority should be asked to do proper research on empty houses all over County Clare. Some people do not seem to know who owns what. We do not have proper data. A friend of mine is a statistician and was trying to research the housing issues and empty houses in Ireland. We do not have any proper data on that and it is time each local authority came up with clear data on all the empty houses, not just the ones that are registered, but all of them. We must look at what we need to do to give incentives. The Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and his Department are looking at more incentives to get empty houses retrofitted and up to livable standard again. However, we have a huge stock of houses already existing in Ireland and we must start doing more to get those houses to the people who need them.