John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would like to make a couple of legitimate points on housing based on my experience of what is happening in Dundalk, County Louth. On one hand we have all these ambitions plans to hit all these targets of housing that we need to build every year, which is great, while on the other hand we have a Planning Regulator who is giving advice to local authorities and council executives saying they should dezone land. This is dezoning residential land where any developer can put a planning application in tomorrow. It is dezoning that land from strategic 1 to strategic 2, which means nothing will be built on those lands for the next five years. As a Government, we are saying we want to built a certain number of houses every year, and I have no doubt we will do that. However, at the same time, and I am not saying the Planning Regulator is another arm of Government, we have another unit within the bureaucracy of this country that is instigating ideas and providing advice to local authorities that is detrimental to the targets that we want to set by building houses. How can we, in a county like Louth, say that we want to build a certain number of houses while at the same time county development plans have dezoned any legitimate land? I do not know how that gets resolved. It is a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but parts of the 2018 national planning framework, which was designed before Covid-19, need to be re-examined in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and how much the world has changed since then. I cannot square the circle where we want to build a certain number of houses and yet we have a Planning Regulator telling local authorities to dezone land. I am not saying it is happening everywhere - I hope it is not - but this is my experience of my own home town and what is happening there.

I have said before, and I think Senator Byrne mentioned it earlier, that we have to be able to hold local authorities to account. There can be no excuse for a local authority not leading the way in the building of houses. There can be no excuse for a local authority, such as Louth County Council, punching well above its targets and doing very well while another local authority of a similar size is not living up to what is required of it, and I am talking about those outside the big cities. Chief executives should be held accountable to, and appear before, the Oireachtas committee a couple of times a year to answer. Why is Louth County Council doing really well at this compared to Leitrim County Council or another local authority? The chief executives, whether we like it or not, are answerable to no one. We need to make sure they are answerable to the Oireachtas when it comes to house building, in particular, because otherwise it will be case of local authorities saying in a couple of years' time that they tried their best while the Government will have set all these really important targets that we want to hit but that will not be hit. We need to make sure we are policing that in the local authorities and chief executives are accountable to the Oireachtas for many things but they definitely should be accountable to the Oireachtas housing committee for housing.

My final point on local authorities, and this is to add a positive point, I was really pleased to read about the CPO programme to allow local authorities to acquire vacant properties in the Minister's speech. We in Louth have already been doing this since 2015 because we had a really good director of services for housing and a really good chief executive, who are still there but in different positions. They were able to CPO 130 vacant houses in the town of Dundalk and turn them into social housing with people living in them. Some 130 houses is more than a housing estate.What the council is doing removes vacant and derelict houses that could be causing problems with antisocial behaviour. A dilapidated house may have damp and all sorts of stuff coming into it. There was one local authority house in which the person in question had no resource whatsoever because he or she would not know who owned it or its history. It gets worse and worse. It becomes more expensive for the State to come in to try to do up a property. However, Louth County Council has been a forerunner in doing what I describe. It has been doing so on its own initiative. If the Government is to launch a CPO programme, it should go to a local authority that knows how to do it. Such a local authority is Louth County Council because it was doing this five or six years ago, before it was even a strategy of the Government. I have seen the benefits. A counsellor can go along to the council and point out a vacant home that is causing issues in an area. Within 12 to 15 months, there will be a family of three or four living in it. It is absolutely superb. It should be a flagship priority of the Government to use the CPO process to put vacant houses back into the housing stock. I would love to see an energetic programme of this kind implemented across every local authority area in the country.