Joe Conway (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh míle maith agat. I want to address the business of derelict sites in ten brief itemised points. Over half of local authorities are failing to collect money from the owners of derelict sites. The latest figures suggest that councils are owed more than €20 million in unpaid levies. Seventeen of the 31 local authorities did not collect any money from dereliction merchants. Just €604,000 was collected by the councils in the last year reckonable, despite close to €1 million being owed in these local authorities. This means that €20.5 million is owed by dereliction merchants and the meter is running all the time. Each local authority keeps a derelict sites register, which includes the sites subject to the annual levy of 7%. If unpaid, this levy attracts interest of 1.25% per month. Local authorities can take dereliction merchants to court to recover the debt or they can compulsorily purchase the site and the money owed can become a charge on the land. Incidents of dereliction increased by 21% in 2023 compared with 2022. If local authorities are so ineffectual in collecting levies, would the Minister and his Department consider increasing the levy to something like 10%? Finally, and this is more in the realm of local and folk wisdom, I am sure that the Minister and everybody here has heard the old adage that it is not how high you swing the hatchet; it is how deep you bury it.

We have the legislation and levies but they are not working. We must use our intellectual grey matter as a society, and as local authorities, to come up with answers and understand why this is not working because dereliction is a curse and scourge on local towns and local communities. We cannot realistically allow this to go on because we are patently failing to deal with the scourge of dereliction. There are too many people wriggling out of it by giving easy answers. When we try to raise this issue, we are given all sorts of pat answers - we are told that it is difficult to go to court and that we will never get a washer out of them. I wonder whether the Department, the Ministers and the combined wisdom of the Government can get their heads together to incentivise local authorities - they need to really put the squeeze on local authorities - to go after these people because it is a situation that should not be allowed to prevail.