Pauline Tully (Sinn Fein)

I am happy to speak in support of the Dereliction and Building Regeneration Bill. We are living through a housing crisis at the moment so every opportunity must be used to ensure we bring buildings of all sorts back into use for housing. I noticed the levels of vacancy in our towns and villages when I was canvassing in 2020. We saw many vacant buildings, some of them derelict, on the main streets and along all the other streets in all the towns and villages throughout Cavan. I know it is no different from any other county. Unfortunately, since that canvassing it has not actually changed. A friend of mine was a census enumerator a number of years ago and she said that, in the rural areas, there are a high number of vacant properties. According to the last census, there are more than 160,000 vacant properties throughout the country. I recall asking a person I was canvassing with were we not canvassing a particular row of houses in a town and he said there was no one living in any one of them. Those houses were in good condition but people were not renting them out or living in them and they were not willing to sell. I believe they were just holding out to try to get a better price if the housing market improved. It seems we need more incentives for people to sell.

I welcome the vacant property tax but it is a self-declared tax and I do not know that it is being pursued and implemented enough. We need to do more about that. I engaged with one of the council's engineers whose duty it was to compile the register of derelict buildings in the county. He said that every time they went around compiling this, he would have a number of staff doing the work with him, but the next thing is the staff would be pulled away and redeployed to another section of the council and then it never got finished. He was trying to pursue this on his own and it is a very difficult job. We need to do more to try to ensure people who own derelict buildings are actually made to do something with them. Some of the buildings are in quite a dangerous condition. I have been contacted by people who are living beside derelict properties that have started to fall down. They are really concerned for their own property and for their own safety.

The vacant property refurbishment grant is welcome. We have seen a lot of houses actually brought back into use but the grant needs to be reviewed because there is a difficulty with the payments not being in stages. Perhaps that could be looked at so people do not have to get all the work done in 13 months and then pay for it all up front. It can be difficult to get that done. I have also heard recently of a number of people who had a property or house rented, and to qualify for the grant when their tenants left, they did not rent the property again. They left it lying vacant for two years so they could claim the grants. We are taking houses out of the rental market by doing that. Okay, when they do up the property it will be rented again, but I do not know how this can addressed. It is actually reducing the number of houses on the market.

Another aspect of the grant, which I also brought up with the Minister, Deputy Browne, is the number of people who bought houses to avail of the property grant and who actually qualified for it, but because they were homeless and could not afford to rent or stay in bed and breakfast accommodation, they moved into the house and then were told they no longer qualified for the vacant property grant. Is this something that could be addressed? The property was vacant for the two years or more and it qualified for the grant. They did not know they had to get the application in before they could live in the property. The property was in a poor condition, they needed the money to do it up, but suddenly they were told they did not qualify anymore. They were very upset about it and they had no option but to live in that house even though it was not in a safe condition. They needed the money to update the electrics and so forth.

I am disappointed - as other speakers are - about the Bill being pushed down the road for a year. I do not think that is necessary. Everything should be done to bring as many properties as possible back into use as residential or, if they are business properties and no longer being used as a business property, to convert them to residential.