Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. It is the first time I have had the opportunity to meet him in the Chamber. It is a huge, onerous task as Senator Fitzpatrick said. I do not want to spend my ten minutes looking back and I do not want to engage in a blame game. We have to recognise that we have a crisis and we have to do something about it.

The State, the Government, the Opposition and whoever else is involved in this need to work in a collaborative way with the local authorities, the construction companies, the public sector and the private sector because, quite frankly, people do not give a damn who is building the houses. We want to build homes and we want to build sustainable communities. That is the bottom line for people. There has to be a synergy between the public and private sector. Let us get out of all this ideology of public versus private because it has not got us very far. There are synergies and we can tap into experience and finance from both the private and public sector. That is the way to go, and the Minister has indicated that. There needs to be a significant increase in what I like to call public housing. I do not think we have got our understanding of the Vienna model out of our heads yet. Vienna is a very nice place to be, but the Vienna model is public housing rent based on one's disposable income. That is what it is about. People can be proud and are proud to live in public housing. They want secure tenure and they want fair rent. That is very important.

I often think of the amount of equity, finance and capital we have tied up in private homes in Ireland, because we are so obsessed with ownership of homes. If only some of that was put into enterprise and other venture capital projects, what a different country we might have. I understand the preoccupation and the desire to own your home, but that is another issue for another day. We need to target our resources.

I had the opportunity to meet the Planning Regulator at an event the other day and he said something to me which I thought about and emailed him about it the next day. We refer to the Dublin local authority building bulletin quarterly reports, which the Minister will be well aware of. I had not seen the last one. I double-checked with the Planning Regulator on the figures and printed off the report today so I was fully aware of the facts. It is a report that is on the desk of everyone involved in housing. In the document it says that, regarding development potential in active sites, there is a total of 49,212 permitted but uncommenced residential units, that is, permitted but have not been developed. Of those, 41,941 uncommenced units are on 270 inactive sites and 7,272 uncommenced units on 198 active sites. What does that tell us? It is not about the planning. These have got planning. We have heard so much about planning, yet somehow this is there. I am going to email this to everyone here today because we need to look at it. We have to ask, and the Minister and his officials have to ask, what is going on? We have thousands and thousands of sites that have permission but are being sat on. Who is making the money and capitalising? Local authorities have rezoned. The Planning Regulator may or may not have looked at some of these, but these are sites that are ready to go and technically should be built. You either use it or you lose it. In a housing crisis, those figures are a disgrace. Turning to An Bord Pleanála, the Minister said that planning, rightly, was one of the critical components of this policy. We debated at great length in this House the Planning and Development Bill and the emergency aspect of getting it through. It was guillotined in both Houses of the Oireachtas. We still have not had the Bill translated into Gaeilge. If there was a legal challenge, that would be an absolute requirement because people are entitled to litigate as Gaeilge. I am aware that issue is being addressed by the Oireachtas, but resources will have to be put in place, because I am told it may be next year before the full translation of this Bill is ready. I ask the Minister to talk to people in his Department and in the Oireachtas to see how we can fully resource and assist those people to carry out that critical part of parliamentary work.

The Minister will be familiar with the, again disastrous, strategic housing development proposals. Until very recently, An Bord Pleanála had a section of its website on it and there were thousands and thousands of units there. I looked for it today and it was gone. I got one of my staff to check it out and was told it had been taken down, so I want the Minister to contact An Bord Pleanála tomorrow and ask it about this. Data and confidence are critical if we are to bring people on this journey and explain the problems. Let us not sweep them under the carpet or hide them. I am not suggesting the Minister is doing any of that, but An Bord Pleanála is under his remit and I am asking for that data to be put back up. I want to know how many units are waiting for approval within An Bord Pleanála under the now-defunct strategic housing development scheme. It is important. The Minister will recall that his colleagues in government billed this as a fast-track scheme, yet thousands and thousands of units still have not been developed under this fast track scheme. Eventually, people saw wisdom and abandoned the scheme. I ask the Minister to take that matter up with An Bord Pleanála.

An important document he has not referenced is the Report of The Housing Commission, an excellent body of work. We engaged and the State engaged and got this thing going. We need to have a critical look and tease it out. When the Oireachtas joint committees are established, the one on housing and local government needs to look at that. There is a significant volume of really positive work and if if the Government is not accepting all the commission’s recommendations, it is important for us to know why. The Government owes that to the people who engaged in the commission’s work.

I am a firm advocate of one-off rural housing. The Minister represents a rural constituency. He and his colleagues, be they councillors, Senators or TDs, know the demand for rural housing. It must, of course, be sustainable. I accept that. There must be tough conditions, though fair. I call on the Minister to honour a long-standing commitment of many Ministers to publishing draft new rural housing guidelines. I say "draft" because they should go out for a period of public consultation with all stakeholders and get feedback. Time and again, I meet councillors of all hues and parties who tell me about this and show me letters from the Minister’s Department with promises about guidelines being published. Nothing has been done in that regard for years, so will the Minister consider that important recommendation? I indicated to him before he came in that I had received correspondence from a councillor from his party, Councillor Audrey Buckley, about a number of concerns and I am very happy he going to take them up directly and do whatever he thinks is appropriate. I also indicated in advance of this that I had written to the Minister on behalf of Thomas Welby of Galway County Council about Circular 23/21, which was sent to chief executives, regarding the affordable housing fund scheme. The Minister might have a look at that in due course and respond as he considers appropriate.

It is important we align our housing provisions and economic development in the national planning framework, as the Minister said. We must look at establishing a housing delivery oversight executive because people want to know what is happening and to trust that the figures they are being told are the correct ones, properly validated by an independent body. That saves us from any suggested political manipulation of figures. People want confidence and I am asking the Minister to consider the establishment of a housing delivery oversight office.I want further powers and resources for local authorities so they can be enabled and supported to deliver real and sustainable housing projects within their areas. I want in particular to ask the Minister to take urgent action to ensure the delivery of the greater Dublin drainage project for 2030. The lack of drainage is now a blockage to some development and the project must happen.

I accept that there are great difficulties and challenges. I do not doubt that people in this House from all parties and none are here to support the Minister. It is important that we stay focused and have real, validated and accurate data for every aspect of the challenges because that instills confidence in policymakers and city and county councillors. I wish the Minister well.