Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I second the motion. I thank the Minister of State for taking this motion. I thank my colleague, Senator Moynihan, for all the work she has done as housing spokesperson for our party, the Labour Party, particularly in fighting dereliction and vacancy. While we need homes built across this country, we also know that a mass amount of properties are being wasted and could be brought back into use. Across every street and road in our urban villages, inner city and towns - in Dublin and across the country - there are sites that have lain undeveloped for years. Houses are boarded up and left to rot and buildings are run down and we have to ask how this has been allowed to happen.

We know there are 12,000 vacant houses and commercial properties across Dublin, and over 3,000 properties vacant between the Royal Canal and the Grand Canal. These are not homes that are vacant because someone is renovating, the person is in a nursing home, it is for sale or it is for rent. These are empty buildings that have lain untouched and all the while we have a desperate need for homes, community amenities, childcare, artist's spaces and other uses in our communities. We have these figures because An Post's subsidiary GeoDirectory and Tailte Éireann go to lengths to ensure that the data exclude the categories I spoke about there.

Why do we have this situation? Why is the Government tolerating this when we know there are nearly 13,000 people in emergency accommodation? We know that rental availability is at an all-time low, there are all too few houses to buy and we have a tortuously slow social housing building programme. There is a vacant homes tax in place but at the low level it is set, does the Government believe it will be enough to spur property owners to do the right thing? For the vacant sites that lie across this country, thousands of which have planning permission for homes, what is the Government doing to ensure that this construction gets started? At the end of last year there were 42,000 uncommenced planning permissions across Dublin.

The Minister of State will probably say there is lots of building going on across the country, and I have no doubt that there is, but when I cycle around the areas that I am most familiar with, in Dublin 1, Dublin 3, Dublin 7, Dublin 9 and Dublin 11, I see sites that have had planning permission for a considerable period of time and have yet to be built. These include the Denis Mahony site on Glasnevin Hill; the site in Glasnevin where Daneswell Place is; Addison Park next to the Botanical Gardens; and the site of the proposed Lidl supermarket in Ballybough. These sites have had planning permission for a substantial period of time. We do not have proper use-it or lose-it provisions within Irish planning or housing law to ensure, that if developers and owners do not develop within a period, the State can go in and buy up those sites.

We have to ask about the money that is being thrown at dereliction and vacancy. Will that be enough to solve the problem? The schemes the Government is talking about and proposed, which are welcome, need a willing seller. We know that in many instances the reality is much more complicated. In far too many cases the land hoarders, interminable legal disputes, contested wills and forgotten properties have all been tolerated, all because of some mistaken notion that property ownership is sacred in this country. Despite the cost to our communities of dereliction and the fact that vacancy and dereliction are depriving people of homes and community amenities, there is a notion that the owner is king.

I am not a lawyer but from all the lawyers I have listened to, there is no basis in Bunreacht na hÉireann that housing ownership has to take priority over everybody else's needs, particularly when that property is being wasted and not put to use within our communities. What is more, as I understand it there is a report sitting in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, conducted by the Law Reform Commission, about how the State and local authorities can intervene in a more timely and less costly manner to take over derelict properties. Despite the many pages of the planning and development Bill that we will see go through this House over the coming weeks and months, no space has been found to take on board those recommendations.

Every week I cycle past Aldborough House on Portland Row in Dublin 1. It is one of the last Georgian mansions to be built in Dublin and the home of the first theatre on the island of Ireland. It has lain derelict and decaying over the past two decades. It is a massive and hulking presence in the middle of a disadvantaged community and one that is crying out for housing, childcare and artist's facilities and community amenities. Yet, neither the State or Dublin City Council have tried to take over this building. We have an owner that we believe will try to hold out and hold the State to ransom. The owner will certainly try to extract too high a price from the State. Aldborough House represents all that is wrong with our CPO system and we need to radically overhaul it.

We need to see an end to the long and drawn-out notice-to-treat procedures. We want to see CPOs conducted by vesting order procedure and that this procedure be changed in order that the purchase is completed within 12 months and that the price is determined by the valuation tribunal so it is a transparent process. We want to see that, where the owner cannot be found, which often happens, the acquiring body lodges the compensation with the High Court in order that the price is frozen in time and kept there for a period of years. We have to overcome the outrageous situation and deterrent to many local authorities whereby if they CPO a property and the owner comes on the scene at a later date, not only does the local authority have to pay the value of the property at the time but it must also pay the uplift, which is the value of the money the local authority put into the property in order to make it habitable. With these changes to CPO laws, we can begin to realise the dreams of communities that would no longer have to tolerate dereliction and vacancy and the owner would get a fair price.

The other key point we want to raise is that there is a pattern, which Senator Moynihan touched on, of the colossal amount of money we have seen local authorities in this country spend on stabilising properties they do not own and have not been able to reap the value from in recent decades. There is an example that Senator Fitzpatrick and I will be well familiar with on 19 and 21 Connaught Street, in Dublin 7. Two fine houses there have been vacant for as long as many people in the area can remember and in 2009 they were put on the derelict site register. Dublin City Council had to go in and spend money on those houses to try to stabilise them and to protect the other houses in the area. By doing that, the houses were no longer derelict so they had to be taken off the derelict site register and did not qualify for CPO. We have to fast forward a number of years before the houses fell into disrepair again and were put back on the derelict site register. Then Dublin City Council went and compulsorily purchased those properties. We are still waiting for those properties to be developed but we believe they will be.In all of this process, which has gone on for 15 years, money has been wasted by Dublin City Council on those houses and there has been a lack of opportunity to house families and individuals. There is so much wrong with our laws and with the local authorities' attitude to vacancy and dereliction. It is in the power of the Government to make sure there is a real change and that these houses are brought back into use very quickly. It takes time to build houses but houses that are vacant and derelict can be turned around in a much quicker period of time. We need the Government to take it seriously.