Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to address the Housing for All plan. I am a member of the joint Oireachtas committee and have valued having an input into this plan and the journey that the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, in particular, has travelled along with us over the past year in the work that we have done on that.

I, too, take offence at Senator Fitzpatrick's reference to a lost decade. It is a disingenuous comment that is completely unnecessary. Maybe a history lesson is required. Fine Gael has held the Ministry for housing since 2016. From then until now we have outstripped any Opposition ambitions when it has come to the building of social housing, and that was done under a Fine Gael Minister.

The Land Development Agency is the backbone of many of the provisions and plans here. There is a fantastic chart on page 87 of Housing for All that lays out the list of State lands planned to be transferred to the Land Development Agency. Most of the newly acquired agency land appears in my home constituency of Dublin South-Central and it is fantastic. Again, that was an initiative that began under the former Minister, Eoghan Murphy.

There is no doubt all parties came into coalition with a determination to build on the excellent foundations that were laid down in Rebuilding Ireland and to enhance them. Thanks to the co-operation of our three parties, the ideas and the commitment and determination, we have a fantastic, well-resourced and well-thought out plan that covers the provision of housing in a variety of ways, including for renters and for first-time buyers and for right sizing properties in terms of older people who would perhaps like to trade down and move but do not want to leave their communities. There is a plan to start exploring what we can do in communities to ensure we have elder-friendly provisions.

There are to be 2,000 cost-rental properties per year, the first of which was launched by the former Minister, Eoghan Murphy, in my home constituency, in the former St. Michael's estate, and hopefully we will see that soon. Some 20% of all new homes are going to be social and affordable housing, so that first-time buyers get that opportunity. The shared equity scheme, as much as it is criticised, is a fantastic initiative. I bought my first home on the back of the shared ownership scheme a long time ago, just off James Street. It gave people who would never have had an opportunity to get a mortgage at the values of properties at the time an opportunity get on the property ladder and I value that scheme coming back in. The right sizing provision is really necessary.

We need to hold local authorities to account, ensuring that they know how to implement the affordable housing provisions and to access that, and to work with whoever wants to work with them in their areas, ensuring that this provision is met and that we keep driving affordable housing. It is right to support and promote home ownership as the ultimate goal. At the end of our careers, we will have pensions and reduced income. It would be nice at that point for a huge cohort to have home ownership and security of tenure. Having indefinite duration tenancies, looking at variations of that, which are constitutionally permissible, and examining and exploring that is very good. All of that is within the Housing for All.

The remote working provisions being promoted by the Tánaiste's Department bring back the possibility of living in our towns and villages, so the Town Centres First is a really good provision in that regard.

One of the legacies of the previous building boom in the noughties is that we have many defective apartments. We have complexes which have fire problems. Yesterday I received a frightening statistic regarding Dublin South-Central and that was that there are 10,000 known apartments in that area, which are likely to be affected by the fire defects. That is something the Minister's Department needs to drive forward. We really need fairness here. Institutional landlords, who have to rectify defects, can write that off against tax, but individuals cannot. We need fairness and justice for homeowners who are affected through no fault of their own. We have heard about mica and pyrite and the campaigns there are extremely good and worthy. However, there is another campaign and the working group's terms of reference are too narrow and we need action on it urgently.