Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Senator will get his opportunity.

Senator Fitzpatrick mentioned the role of local authorities. Under the housing Acts, local authorities are supposed to set out a strategy to deal with housing requirements in their own areas. Senator Fitzpatrick was on Dublin City Council, which has an abysmal record in facing up to the housing shortage in Dublin city. It spends millions refurbishing apartment developments which it built and then allowed to fall into complete states of neglect. We can see examples of this neglect in Ballymun, St. Teresa's Gardens and Fatima Mansions. The council is spending millions on refurbishing but has put in place almost no new, large-scale developments in the last few years. Ballymun is a monument to the bad planning, now, of Dublin City Council. It had good, solid apartment buildings there and it allowed those buildings to degenerate because it was not willing to invest in the properties it owned. Dublin City Council gave over Ballymun to the private sector and it has been replanned as a community. However, it is windswept and it has not turned out to be the great new city that it should have been. Dublin City Council has a lot of responsibility for with regard to the problems of the capital. It may be that we need one housing authority for Dublin city and County because the county lines are a bit ridiculous.

I want to say something about the planning law in relation to the Office of the Planning Regulator. I am glad the Minister overruled the Office of the Planning Regulator recently. He should do that very often because that office is calculated to undermine the provision of housing right across Ireland. There is a notion in the Minister's Department that somehow local authorities do not know what they are doing in rural Ireland. If one looks at an old Ordnance Survey map from 1911, one can see the number of dwellings speckled across the map. Now we have a Department trying to say that people cannot build in rural areas any more. The Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, wants us to live in villages and towns. The people of Ireland do not want that and I do not care about the theory that somehow it is environmentally damaging to allow one-off housing. People in Ireland want to live in one-off housing. There were plenty of one-off houses and there are plenty of abandoned houses in rural Ireland to this day. Those people deserve a different planning regime.

The Minister said that the figures for last year were the highest on record since 1975. That is interesting. I congratulate him on getting up to a record level in that way. How was it that we could do more in 1975 than we can do in 2023? Was it the Constitution? No. Was it resources? No. Was it political will? Yes. I am not trying to annoy the Minister but how have we arrived at a situation where we are clapping ourselves on the back for doing, in a wealthy country, what a much poorer country could do a half century ago?