Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming in. As I did during the debate on Housing for All last week, I acknowledge the good work being done by Government in this area, particularly relating to individual grants. However, much more can be done by the State particularly by local authorities relating to the compulsory purchase order, CPO, process. Vacancy and dereliction is a housing issue but it is also an urban renewal issue. In every city, town and village in Ireland there are vacant spaces that blight our community, with the census estimating that there are more than 170,000 vacant sites in Ireland. We see it every day in urban centres including villages where there are undeveloped sites that are not only an eyesore but are a waste of valuable land. Those sites could be transformed for use within those towns and villages. That could be for housing use but also for community spaces, some of which we are very much lacking. It is a symbol of how much we have neglected our urban and town spaces that we have let private developers and landlords hoard spaces and operate off their own accord without the needs of community in mind.

I was a member of a local authority for 11 years. At one stage, on the basis that it would be developed, Dublin City Council sold a vacant site on the corner of Dolphins Barn to a developer who put in an application for housing, which we all supported, and then left it sit there vacant for the next seven years. The local authority got itself into knots trying to get back a building that belonged to it, which it had sold to the developer on the basis that it would develop the site. It took us a long time to get it back and now it is set to be used for the community, potentially as a library, arts and cultural space.

Something has to give with that. Local authorities are floundering in the face of it. They do not have the power or the resources to acquire, renovate and retrofit these sites to renew our communities. The CPO process is cumbersome and expensive and it takes too long to have a significant effect on the vacancy and dereliction we see in our towns and villages. There is a dearth of community and creative spaces for young people while we sit and look at these beautiful buildings falling further into dereliction. While vacant home grants and dereliction grants are very much welcome, they are for individuals. Some of the buildings that require intervention need technical and conservation expertise. They need people who know how to do this.

The vacant homes tax has not gone far enough to address vacancy. In the face of a national housing crisis these measures are paltry. With 60,000 households on the social housing list and 13,000 people homeless across the country, it is untenable that we are allowing this to happen. Local authorities need to take a more proactive approach to bringing these buildings back into use. There is a dearth of community and residential spaces. It is very hard for local authorities to take sites back into ownership. Even when they have them in ownership, local authorities ignore them and let them fall further into dereliction again.

In my village of Chapelizod in Dublin, there is a beautiful old schoolhouse building, which then became a butcher's shop. For the past couple of years, I have been urging Dublin City Council to put a CPO on it. I know that will take years to happen. Even when the local authority gets it, the funding will not necessarily be there and it will not be a priority for the council. I know that because the local authority owns another site directly across from that and it has done nothing with it in recent years.

It is good that the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, is in this chair because he knows the problems we have had with the Iveagh Markets, for example. It was a local authority-owned site and it is an amazing building that is on the record of protected structures. It was given to a publican who has not developed it and the local authority has ended up in the courts or ended up in negotiations over the past five years with them. With that particular site, I sat there and waited for planning permission to lapse on it before I moved a motion on the area committee to get the local authority to try to take it back into ownership. We then waited again for things like Sundays, Christmas and everything else to be taken into account. Even when that was passed and the city manager committed to trying to take it back into ownership, we have been stuck in mediation with somebody who is refusing to do anything with it and has threatened to take both the State and the local authority through the courts as that building has got worse and worse.

Tonight, we are proposing a wider set of measures to tackle vacancy. It starts by restoring the power to our local authorities and resourcing them for the purpose of undertaking the serious and extensive retrofitting, renewal and renovation of these projects.So many towns and villages need the lights turned back on and they need to take action on vacant buildings but it is complicated and expensive and it requires a specialist knowledge that individuals do not have. Local authorities should not just see this as part of their housing remit but their urban renewal remit.

We want to review and streamline the CPO process and hopefully we can do that as part of the forthcoming planning Bill, which we have not seen in detail. This could be done by introducing a use-it or lose-it rule on undeveloped properties with existing planning permissions in order that local authorities have the mechanisms to pull long-term vacant properties into public ownership, like that site I talked about in Dolphin's Barn. We also need to expand the qualifying skills for the purposes of attaining employment to include essential construction and conservation skills. We are all aware that there is a crisis within that sector. It is difficult to get builders and people with specialist knowledge and we need to incentivise people to do construction work.

We know this is a large and extensive undertaking but it is a necessary one in the face of our decaying urban centres and rural villages. We are asking the Government to allow local authorities to play a greater role in tackling vacancy and dereliction in order that we can turn the lights back on in our towns and villages and can build an Ireland that works for all within our urban and rural centres.