Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State and congratulate him on his appointment. We are familiar with each other. We worked well in agriculture for a number of years. I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House. At 4 p.m. yesterday evening, I received a letter from the Department stating that, unfortunately, none of the Ministers from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage were available to take my Commencement matter today but the Minister of State, Deputy McConalogue, had kindly agreed to take a response. The Minister of State is welcome and I thank him, but I want to put a marker down here as we start in the Seanad again. As we rarely get an opportunity to engage with a Minister, these Commencement matters are critically important to our constructive parliamentary dialogue. If the Department is listening in, I ask it to make some effort to have a Minister from the Department come in.I am going to set out a few concerns about Tailte Éireann and I do not really expect the Minister of State to know the finer detail of what I might say. Indeed, I did not know yesterday what I was going to say and hence an hour ago I changed my contribution. For any Minister or Minister of State to come here and be expected to read some sort of anticipated response is irrelevant and a disservice to the Department, the Minister or Minister of State and the elected Member. I hope that point will be taken on board.

The Minister of State will be very familiar with Tailte Éireann. It is the State agency responsible for property registration, property valuation and the national mapping service. It was established on 1 March 2023 and I was centrally involved in the pre-legislative scrutiny of all those matters as part of the Oireachtas joint committee on housing and local government. We dealt with this, which is a critical issue. Tailte Éireann was formed from the merger of the Property Registration Authority, the Valuation Office and the Ordnance Survey of Ireland. It is critical in the context of the registration of farmland and commercial properties. We can speak of government policy and the Town Centre First approach. I was in Waterford yesterday and heard stories about how nobody could find out who owned properties the local authority was involved with. It affects farmland, farm buildings and commercial properties and we must have a co-ordinated response with respect to the work of Tailte Éireann. An article published in Saturday's The Irish Timesraised a number of concerns about the body. I will reference some of them. The article states:

... Tailte Éireann, [has] been the source of "growing frustration" for solicitors involved in conveyancing and their clients, a Law Society committee has said.

Despite meetings between the registry and the conveyancing committee of the solicitors’ representative body, there "has only been limited progress" in having criticisms addressed, the committee has said.

The committee has been "forthright" in bringing to the attention of the land registration body the difficulties the changes are creating, but there is still a wide gulf between the two parties ...

That needs to be addressed.

There are critical changes required and I will touch on some of them. We need an immediate root and branch review of Tailte Éireann. That is my ask today. What is the issue? Does the body have sufficient resources? Has it the capability and skills with respect to IT resources and training? Has it initiated, engaged or spent great amounts on an IT system that is not fully operational? These are very pertinent questions in these days when we are talking about accountability, transparency and value for money. We need confidence in Tailte Éireann's capacity to provide an authoritative land and property database in a timely manner. It is not happening. Has it developed the appropriate and enhanced database systems required for this task? We want efficiency in relation to digital first and we want to look at the Tailte Éireann board's statement of strategy. Is it being implemented? Has the board the confidence in Tailte Éireann to do its job? There are the issues around local government and the Town Centre First approach.

In essence, I have no confidence in Tailte Éireann and many people do not either. Many solicitors are telling me clients are coming in and threatening to complain about them because of things clients feel they are not doing for them when in effect the buck stops with Tailte Éireann because of the way it is not dealing with issues in a timely manner. There are farm sales falling because of inefficiencies in Tailte Éireann. There are pubs and commercial buildings in Ireland falling because of Tailte Éireann. It is about the timely delivery of its mandate. This needs to change. I am asking for a review and am interested to hear what the Minister of State has to say.