Cathal Byrne (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is most welcome to the Chamber today. We are both from the same town and it is a source of great pride in the town that he has been elevated to the Cabinet as Minister for housing. I know the Minister's family and know how proud his parents are of his role. There is a great tradition of public service in his family, with his grand-uncle, his father and now himself representing the people of Wexford in Dáil Éireann. I sincerely wish him the very best of luck.

I will address some of the measures that could possibly be utilised to a greater extent to ensure that we deliver more housing over the course of this term. Housing is the single biggest challenge for this Government. There is no question that the only way it will be delivered is through all of us working together. I certainly will work with the Minister to maximise the outturn of housing over the next number of years. The local authority housing activation fund was first introduced in August 2016 with €200 million of Government funding made available to ensure that some of the infrastructure deficits around, for example, access roads, could be delivered in a more cost-effective way, whereby the initial costs that previously would have been levied through the local authority as financial contributions back on developers could instead be supported through the Government. There is an opportunity to reopen that source of funding for local authorities and make it available to them in order to ensure the land we have available to us is being maximised for the delivery of housing.

Second, there is a missed opportunity at the moment with regard to local authorities actually being proactive about going out and sourcing land for the delivery of social and affordable housing. As a councillor in Wexford County Council for five and a half years, I was very critical of the local authority relying on an advertisement in the local papers as a mechanism to inform developers and landowners that it was interested in parties getting involved with purchasing, acquiring and developing land for social and affordable housing. I refer to the model by which vacant homes officers were placed in the local authority, designated and focused on regenerating vacant and homes and derelict properties. Perhaps the Department could look at a role for an individual whose sole focus is on securing and acquiring more land for the local authority to build on.

I also want to raise the compulsory purchase order process. The Minister will be aware from his own background that there are enormous challenges once a local authority initiates a CPO, with regard to judicial reviews. We see that at the moment in Wexford with the judicial review of Wexford County Council's CPO for lands for housing and the SETU campus. There might be an opportunity for the Minister and his colleagues in Cabinet to look at streamlining the process. At the moment we are not maximising the CPO process, in a housing crisis, to secure the land that is needed to develop these sites. If individuals are sitting on lands in key locations, then local authorities should be better empowered to use the CPO process. I also raise the issue of serviced sites and the opportunities that exist for local authorities to provide these serviced sites in rural areas. Ensuring rural people have the right to build on lands available to them must be at the heart of this Government, whether these are lands they have farmed, inherited or purchased. Without development in our rural villages, there will simply not be a rural Ireland. I echo and encourage the Government to heed some of the calls made earlier for the rural planning guidelines framework to be published in draft form for public consultation. Many of the councillors I spoke to during the Seanad campaign race raised this issue too.

Regarding affordable housing schemes for County Wexford, I was disappointed when the Department of housing said there was not an affordability constraint significant enough to merit Wexford County Council delivering affordable housing on a countywide basis. We now have 20 houses in Ramsfort in Gorey. These are A-rated houses being sold to private purchasers at a 30% discount on the market value. I encourage the Minister to have this pilot scheme, which I believe will be a success, rolled out across the rest of County Wexford. I know this is a priority for the Minister. I wish him the very best of luck in his new role and I will certainly work with him in a productive way.