PJ Murphy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Minister on his appointment and thank him for coming to the Seanad to discuss the current housing situation. As the Fine Gael Seanad spokesperson for housing, I raise the issue of wastewater infrastructure across rural Ireland. I will use my own local electoral area of Gort-Kinvarra in south County Galway as the perfect example of a district where the building of houses is at a virtual standstill due to the lack of wastewater infrastructure. Within the district, there are 14 recognised towns and villages, of which only two, namely, Gort and Kinvarra, are serviced with wastewater treatment plants. The other 12 are effectively closed to development due to the lack of this critical infrastructure. Two years ago, as part of a pilot scheme, €21 million was made available by the State to Uisce Éireann for the provision of wastewater treatment facilities in two of the villages in the district, namely, Craughwell and Clarinbridge. To date, nothing has happened to progress these projects and these villages remain at a standstill.

In my neighbouring county of Clare, the villages of Broadford and Cooraclare were allocated funding through the same pilot scheme. Having spoken to my colleague, Deputy Cooney, I can tell the House that in that county, there are massive levels of frustration at the painstakingly slow pace of progress by Uisce Éireann in the development of that infrastructure.

There are a considerable number of towns and villages across rural Ireland that are currently serviced with municipal wastewater treatment plants that have reached capacity. The towns and villages that do not find themselves on the current capital plan are now closed to development. These include the key Galway town of Ballinasloe, where the wastewater treatment plant has now reached capacity, as well as Mountbellew, Glenamaddy, Ballygar and Gort. All of those towns are now closed to development due to the lack of capacity in existing plants. The same is true for Kilkishen in County Clare.

In advance of responsibilities being handed over to Irish Water in 2024, substantial work had been done by Galway County Council to develop plans for an east Galway main drainage scheme, which is now called the greater Galway drainage strategy. The scheme was intended to provide wastewater treatment for Athenry, Clarinbridge, Kilcolgan, Craughwell, Ardrahan, Laban and Ballinderreen. However, since 2014, these plans seem to have sat on a shelf somewhere in the offices of Irish Water. I urge the Minister to ensure those plans are progressed to site selection and planning stage as a matter of urgency.

To date, we have relied on once-off rural housing with stand-alone septic tanks or similar on-site wastewater treatment to house our people in rural Ireland. However, we all know that for numerous reasons, not least the preservation of our countryside, this housing model is not sustainable long term into the future. Therefore, I ask the Minister where our rural young people will live. In a rural parish such as my own, which has two small, unserviced villages, namely, Ardrahan and Laban, with a large rural hinterland dotted with old farmhouses and once-off rural houses that have been built over the past 25 years, a generation of young people are growing up faced with the reality that due to the lack of wastewater infrastructure in their home villages, they will be forced to leave their native place to find housing elsewhere.While we have a housing crisis in rural Ireland, it is a housing crisis caused by an infrastructure crisis. We have the land to build on and the people to do the building, but our towns and villages, which either remain unserviced or the current plants have reached capacity, are closed for development. Local area plans are not put in place for unserviced villages and, due to environmental concerns, on-site packaged treatment plants are no longer acceptable to most local authorities for private housing developments. I urge the Minister to use all available resources to put in place wastewater treatment facilities in all Irish towns and villages as a matter of urgency.

The next thing I wish to discuss is student accommodation in college towns such as Galway, Limerick, Cork, Dublin, Maynooth, etc. Students are competing in the local housing rental market for accommodation, where as little as 5% in many cases are accommodated in on-campus or college-owned accommodation. Needless to say, this is putting massive pressure on the rental sectors in these places. Irish colleges and universities profit massively from the intake of fee-paying international students who also contribute to the pressure on the housing rental market. Approximately 40,400 international students were enrolled in higher education institutes in Ireland in 2024, with a further 128,400 international students enrolled in private English-language schools throughout Ireland. While this is a massive profit-making industry for these colleges, we cannot underestimate the pressure this is putting on the availability of housing in this State.

Let us look for a moment at the city of Rzeszów in Poland which, just like Dublin, markets itself internationally as a destination to study. That city is alive with students and they are the lifeblood of the city’s economy. Unlike here, however, just 1.2% of the students at the University of Rzeszów are accommodated in the private rental market. More than 98% are accommodated in purpose-built student accommodation, which is not only better for the students themselves but takes massive pressure off the private rental market. Before a college or a private institute of education in that city can make a course place available to an international student, they must first display to the relevant authorities that they have at their disposal purpose-built student accommodation to house that student. This is a model we are going to have to look at very seriously in this country.

The last thing I will touch on today is what I consider to have been a very shortsighted act which was carried out on a large number of local authority houses in recent years, that is, the blocking up of fully functional chimneys and solid-fuel fireplaces to achieve a particular BER rating. This act, which was in many cases carried out with no consultation with tenants, left thousands of homes with no source of heat in the absence of electricity. Thousands of local authority tenants around Ireland sat for days and weeks in the cold without heat after the storm. We took away the emergency backup plan. When it comes to heating your home, you always need an emergency backup plan. I call on the Minister to cease this regressive action and for the working chimneys and solid-fuel fireplaces to be reinstated in all local authority-owned homes that are not served with piped gas heating.