Joe Flaherty (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. It is probably not his first time in here but I have been off for some months so it is my first time to see him here. I congratulate him on his role. It is great to see him getting to grips with it so quickly.

If the weather was not so good I would have come out in a cold sweat when I saw the Bill on the schedule for today because, like Senator Boyhan, I spent 122 hours in committee trying to get this Bill to where it is at. I see some of the beleaguered officials are still here and still toying with the Bill. If memory serves me right, it was the second largest Bill in the history of the State, so it is a significant piece of legislation and very much in line with the fact that we must mobilise every lever as we try to tackle the current crisis in housing.

The Minister, Deputy Browne, has rightly said that everything humanly possible will be done. This is an important piece of infrastructure around which many of the levers will be activated. It is good to see the move to An Coimisiún Pleanála. That is significant. It has been a bone of contention for many people in this Chamber and among the general public for many years. What the public want to see is the commitment to more staff happening quickly and that the Minister and the Ministers of State in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage will stay in constant contact with it. We need to see radical and sweeping change from An Bord Pleanála and manpower will be needed to do that. We need to see that happen quickly.

From what we have heard from the Minister in recent weeks, he is challenging local authorities to up their game. He is going to introduce a league table. This would be a bone of contention for many rural local authorities in that they were always very much at the coalface when it came to delivering houses. The biggest bone of contention is with the performance of the Dublin local authorities, particularly Dublin City Council, which has been lethargic. Its actions in trying to mobilise housing have been unforgivable. Several apartment blocks within the confines of the Dublin City Council area have been fitted out and are ready to be furnished but the council is holding them up because it insists that they do not conform with building regulations. Despite numerous mediation meetings, we still do not have a resolution. It is very much the case that someone in the planning department is taking an almost tsar-like approach to it. It makes one wonder sometimes if the people in the Custom House and the confines of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and in other satellite offices realise there is a housing crisis. They certainly seem immune to it given the way they are frustrating developers and, more importantly, communities, nationwide.

Rural local authorities could certainly up their game. A case in point is affordable housing in Longford. We finally have a first affordable housing scheme in Longford. It took the lifetime of the previous Government, five years, to get a commitment from the Department to eventually allow Longford County Council to go ahead with the first 25 affordable houses in the county. When the houses are built, they will be the first commercial development of three-bed semi-detached houses in the county in 19 years. That tells its own story: there has been a lethargy in the Department and it has not grasped the seriousness of the situation.

Everybody, across the floor in this House, is all too aware of the housing challenges. Invariably, 90% of the calls we get every day are about housing: people on the verge of homelessness and people who are frustrated at trying to get onto the local authority housing list. We cannot but empathise with them.

When the Minister speaks about challenging local authorities, the biggest challenge for him and for the Minister of State, Deputy O'Sullivan, is to challenge the Department itself. Nobody had a bigger role to play in the current crisis than the officials in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. I accept that we have made changes and that the local authority process now only involves one phase to activate a capital project. I do not think that is going to happen. It sounds very good but I still have reservations about the commitment of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to deliver what is needed to try to resolve the existing issues.

As much as the Minister is going to challenge local authorities – sometimes I feel they are an easy target – he must also challenge staff in his Department. Everyone here would attest to the fact that one of the biggest impediments to resolving the housing crisis has been the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage itself. It has been cumbersome and slow to get anything through. Local authorities tell us that, on occasion, it is taking them two and a half years to get approval for even a scheme of 12 houses. That is simply not good enough. It is indicative of the frustration that local authorities have felt. It is very easy to do a league table of local authorities but if we drill into it, we invariably find that the source of the hold-ups and what has frustrated them is, in fact, the Department and that must be resolved.

Many in the House would not like to say it, but we need to look at incentivising people to go back into the property market. When we had the crash, we lamented section 23, but if we look across many counties now, we are damn glad we had section 23. If it was not for it, the housing crisis would be significantly worse. When the crash came in 2008, there were 2,500 empty houses in County Longford, most of which were section 23 properties. Every one of those houses is now full. They were the only housing stock we had available to us in the county in the past 20 odd years because there was no building after the crash.We need to bite the bullet on this, and we need to incentivise small-scale investors, much like mom-and pop-people, to go back into the market again and to engage in a different variation of section 23. That is very important.

Infrastructure is a huge challenge for us. Uisce Éireann, much like with the Department of housing, has very much been a laggard in this regard and it has frustrated local authorities. A case in point in rural Ireland is the delivery of upgraded and new sewerage schemes. We spent the five years of the previous Government looking for a breakthrough on a sewerage scheme for Ballymahon. In recent weeks, Uisce Éireann has published notice of CPO that will move that project forward.

The difficulty with Uisce Éireann's position on the delivery of infrastructure and the frustration for local authorities is that we have a stand-off. If a developer wants to build 20 houses in a rural town or village, they will apply to the local authority. The local authority will refuse to give permission on the basis that there is not sufficient capacity because there is no sewerage system. That is fine and technically the correct position. What we need is a circular from the Department of housing to all local authorities giving an undertaking that they can give permission for developments provided the developer provides an interim, developer-led sewage system and also provides a bond that will cover the costs of any remedial works on that. That is one of the quickest ways to leverage a start in house-building because, with the best will in the world, Uisce Éireann is never going to catch up. It will be a laggard at the end of this Government and it will be a laggard in the next Government. Unless there is a fundamental and ideological change within Uisce Éireann, it is not going to catch up. That is another easy, quick win the Department can achieve. The technology for sewerage systems has evolved. Many Irish companies now produce them, including Butler Manufacturing Services in Longford, which sends them around the world. It is exporting to over 50 countries and is a market leader in this area. The technology is there to do this. As the Minister said, we need to look at modern production methods. This is an easy fix for us.

Labour issues are huge for builders at the moment. The houses built during the Celtic tiger period would not be built now because standards are so high, and rightly so. We had the apartment defects and mica, which came at a huge cost to the Irish people and the Government. We need to ensure the houses we build now are state of the art, and certainly to a B energy rating if not to an A standard. In many cases, it is not regular plumbers but engineers and very skilled people who are needed to develop those projects. These people are simply not out there. Likewise, bricklayers and others with skills are not available.

When Lough Ree power station in Lanesborough, which has since closed as we escalated decarbonisation, was built, a firm was brought in from Turkey to complete the project. At the time, 600 workers were brought in, although we had plenty of workers in Ireland at that stage. I do not know why they were brought in then. We have to be creative. The Government needs to go out and identify companies abroad, be it in Turkey or on the margins of eastern Europe, and if they have the skill set we need, we should bring those workers in and allow our building contractors to access them.

It is very easy to roll out target figures and say what we are going to achieve and for the Minister to say all the levers will be activated but creativity is required. The Minister needs to challenge his Department and move beyond the bounds of what was done before. If officials in Departments did not do something last year, they will not do it this year because they do not like to do things differently. There needs to be a realisation within the Department of housing that we are in a housing crisis. I genuinely feel it is the only Department that does not realise we have a housing crisis.