Niall Blaney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Not today, Chairman. I welcome the Minister to the House and say goodbye to the students. Slán anois. The Minister is very welcome. I congratulate him on his new appointment. No doubt it is quite a task, but he has very capable hands and I have great trust in him. I know the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, put everything into the Department.

Some people believe it is a matter of turning on taps and houses will appear. Dealing with housing is no simple task. It is so complex and there is no one fix that fits all. Certainly, from my humble experience in dealing with housing and local authorities, I would be very strong today from the point of view of having a task force for housing and dealing with the local authorities. There is too much variance of opinion on what the legislation says about the delivery of different schemes. So much time is wasted between developers and officials, elected Members of Parliament, local authorities and officials. There has to be a task force that streamlines the information on schemes. Too many local authorities are pulling in different directions with different ideas and interpretations of what they are being told by Departments. Sometimes they cause more harm than good. If we had a proper streamlining of local authorities, we would see far greater delivery.

A task force would actually keep on top of officials from that point of view. Take first and foremost what other Members mentioned here about the delivery of housing. One of the first jobs is buying land. The purchase of lands can take six months and beyond in many cases. I have witnessed that myself in County Donegal. It is pure fear by officials in case they pay too much money. If that task force were there and someone in the Department were at the end of the telephone, it would encourage these people who are in positions to do the purchasing, streamline the purchase process and streamline their thoughts, rather than this paralysis that exists. An awful lot of paralysis exists in local authorities in dealing with housing across the board, and that example I used with regard to purchase is one of them. Croí conaithe has been a very successful grant and I think it can go further. I listened to what other Members have said in that direction as well. I noticed during the general election, when going around rural Donegal, the number of houses that are sitting vacant but not derelict, as Senator Tully said. In many cases, people were probably left those houses by a loved one or relation and do not have the funds to do something with them. This is a good opportunity for the council, if it was put in the position, to collaborate with these homeowners, encourage them to use the grant and provide funds for them to carry out the works on the house. The council would then be the final tenant and would take the house for a prolonged rental period or else purchase the house. There are thousands of such houses right across rural Ireland, as the Minister's colleagues will have pointed out to him. The croí cónaithe grant would be a good avenue for this.

My final point concerns the mica and pyrite situation in Donegal and the other counties where it is evolving. A lot of good work was done in the previous term but there are still some anomalies. I refer in particular to one family who live close to me, Seán and Louise Gibbons and their daughter, Emma. They are ready with the grant and ready to demolish their house, but there is nowhere they can be facilitated as a family until such time as the new house is developed. The Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, wrote to them last year and assured them that legislation would be forthcoming to deal with the awful situation they are in. They cannot demolish the house because they have nowhere else to go. They would like a facility whereby they could keep the old house and build a new house alongside it. Before the new house is constructed, they would sign an agreement whereby the old house would be demolished after the new building starts, rather than before. I will leave that in the Minister's capable hands.