Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am renting, and I have had to rent pretty much all my life. I have rented in Dublin and Galway. As a tenant, I have had the challenges, particularly in difficult times, of having to move many times and find accommodation. I am renting in Ballinasloe now. People have a choice. They obviously want to have a home and invest long term and, please God, that will happen for me too. Availability - demand and supply - is key here. The availability of homes, houses and places people can rent to manage the demand is crucial. In Ballinasloe, more than 137 local authority houses have been built this year alone. That means 137 families are moving into new homes in Ballinasloe and the surrounding area.

It is crucial that we see affordable housing now. We need to see affordable housing. The issues I have are with the development of county development plans and local area plans for our towns to ensure there is allocation of county council land for affordable housing. The challenges I see are where we cannot access affordable R1 and R2 lands but where affordable housing is being brought forward by our local authorities. We need to see supports for local authorities to bring through options for affordable housing. We have the housing assistance payment. In Galway County Council and Roscommon County Council, we have seen an increase of nearly 20% - from €25,000 to €35,000 - in the income threshold for applying for housing and the housing assistance payment. Many people on incomes of €35,000 or less who are working in my town cannot find housing or afford rental prices. That housing assistance payment is crucial. The Government's decision to increase the income threshold to allow people to become eligible to apply for local authority housing and the housing assistance payment made a massive difference to people working in my town.

I want to see more landlords being encouraged to take on the HAP, working with tenants to ensure we have availability. The challenge we have is that people who were on the housing assistance payment are moving into the new homes I spoke about in Ballinasloe and their landlords may be looking to sell their properties. That is the issue I have. I do not want to see the stock of available rental houses and properties being reduced. We need to support small landlords. We need to ensure those properties remain available for rental. If we make it too difficult for a small landlord to rent out a house, in what way would that support any of us in terms of getting availability for housing? We need different types of housing available for everyone at all ages of life. We have students from a school in the Chamber with us today. I am sure that after school, whether they go to college or decide to go travelling, they will rent. At some point in their lives, they will rent before they have the opportunity to move into their own homes. We need to make sure there are landlords available to facilitate that.

When we met representatives from the Union of Students in Ireland, USI, earlier today they spoke about digs and access to digs. I have lived in digs as well. If we did not have the rent-a-room scheme, which was brought in by this Government, people would not be able to rent a room in their house and receive that rental income without any impact on many of their social benefits.The Government has done that. These are the supports we are putting in place. If people have a spare room in their house and there is a college or university down the road, or a hospital with nearly 1,000 people working in it, and they decide to offer that room for rent, they will not lose any benefits to which they are entitled. It is crucial to acknowledge the steps the Government has been putting in place to achieve the supply we need for people at all stages of life and in different types of accommodation. We are working to ensure there is supply and not this issue we have with demand.

On the education side, I am my party's Seanad spokesperson on education and further and higher education. The apprenticeship programmes in construction are crucial. The motion deals with the rental sector and I take the opportunity to highlight the need to ensure we have enough tradespeople available to do all the work needed to build homes. We need people who are excellent at woodwork and carpentry. We need electricians and plumbers. Young people will have lots of choices in deciding what to do when they finish school. Some of them might decide to spend three years studying in college, while others will want to learn and earn. They will have income coming into them while working in a job and they will find out very quickly whether it is the job for them. In a lot of these trades, people will be their own boss. They will decide to start their own business at the age of 25 or 26 and run the show. They will be able to do that because they decided to take on an apprenticeship. It might be a trade in construction or it could be bioengineering, accountancy or auctioneering. There are so many choices. I would like to hear from the Minister of State what actions we are taking to drive the take-up of apprenticeships. We need an apprenticeships centre in Roscommon town.