Deputy Fitzpatrick was starting and he had 30 minutes.
Private Members' Business. - Local Government (Building Land) Bill, 1980: Second Stage (Resumed).
Question again proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
(Cavan-Monaghan): I can summarise the objectives of this Bill, as stated by Deputy Quinn, as a Bill to solve the problem of exorbitant housing prices by controlling the price of building land. It must be admitted that soaring house prices constitute a serious problem particularly for young married couples. The price of houses is going out of the reach of more and more young married couples.
The problem of soaring house prices must be solved. The Government have made no effort to deal with it despite the fact that house prices have almost doubled between 1976 and today. In 1976 the average price of a house was £12,000 and today the price of such a house on a national basis is over £23,000.
There is an obligation on the Government to provide housing for every family who cannot reasonably out of their own resources house themselves. The price of houses in the private sector is rocketing. This means that houses are passing out of the reach of more and more people, and the Government as a matter of policy are building fewer local authority houses. That exacerbates the problem which must be tackled.
This Bill proposes to make a contribution towards the problem of exorbitant house prices by controlling the price of building land. I agree that land conveniently situated should be made available for house building and community purposes on reasonable terms. That is a proposition which no reasonable person could disagree with. By reasonable terms I mean terms that are reasonable to landowners, house purchasers and the community at large, because I believe that the community at large have an input to make to the problem of housing the nation. I believe the terms on which land is made available to house builders should be reasonable.
I want to make it quite clear that there are landowners and land speculators. Land speculators are gentlemen who want to make a quick buck or to become millionaires or very near that by buying land they hope will be needed for building purposes and then they will resell it. I hold no brief for land speculators; I have no time for them. The practice of speculating in a commodity so scarce and so necessary for building houses should be stamped out and made unprofitable. That is my approach and my party's approach to the question of land speculators. People who have availed of knowledge they should not have and purchased land with a view to reselling it as a scarce commodity deserve the harshest treatment from the community and the State.
Landowners in the ordinary accepted sense are an entirely different category. By landowners I mean people who have either inherited land in small, medium or large quantities from their forebears or people who have earned money by working very hard at home or abroad and purchased land for the purpose of using it for farming or using it legitimately for one purpose or another. Land which will be made available for housebuilding and other community purposes should be made available on terms which are fair and equitable to the landowners, the house builders and to the community, who should make a contribution if necessary.
I have studied this Bill carefully, read it a number of times and discussed it with other people. I sincerely feel that it requires genuine landowners of all categories, big and small, throughout the country to become public benefactors. Fine Gael will not, therefore, support this Bill. It might be said that the Bill could be amended on Committee Stage. Deputy Quinn spoke about developing points on Committee Stage, but we know that the realistic approach to this Bill is that there will not be a Committee Stage because the Government have stated that they will oppose it. My party cannot lend their support to this Bill because it would in my considered opinion require landowners from Cork to Donegal and in all the urban authorities and county council areas throughout the country to become public benefactors. That is not a reasonable approach to a difficult problem.
As I have stated, this Bill applies to every corporation, every county council and every urban authority in the country which is a housing authority. I propose to list a few of the most serious objections that will strike anyone on reading the Bill. As I see it, sections 4 and 5 of this Bill freeze all land in the country or can be used to freeze all land in the country for many years or, on one interpretation, freeze it indefinitely. It can freeze land for up to 10 years by making a designating order and then towards the end of that order, amending it. I am not going to argue whether you can have a third or fourth attempt at amending it; it does not matter. The effect of that is to provide that once the order is made the owner of the land cannot sell it to any person or body other than the local authority and the local authority need not purchase it for up to 10 years. That is unreasonable and unacceptable. That is the first big objection that I see in the Bill.
The next and fundamental objection that any reasonable person must have to the Bill is the compensation provision of the Bill, the provisions in the Bill for compensating owners of land for land acquired from those owners against their will. I am not going to base my objections and those of my party to this Bill on constitutional grounds. I could make a constitutional speech here and say that the Bill is unconstitutional. That may be and I think it is but, apart altogether from any constitutional objections that there are to the Bill, I want to object to it in fair play, equity, distributive justice or call it what you like. The provisions in the Bill in regard to compensation are unfair and unjust to genuine land owners. Compensation, according to the relevant sections of the Bill shall be fixed on the basis of existing use and on the assumption that the lands could never be used for any purpose other than those for which they were being used on the date of referral to the tribunal for the assessment of compensation. That is quite unfair. I do not believe that land should be made available for house building for what I call, being old enough to remember it, black market prices. I am against that. It should be made available at reasonable prices and the owner of the land should share in the benefit that is going and in the value of the land. I say as one knowing something about agriculture, in so far as I was reared on a farm and so on, that if we pay on agricultural use value, what is the position of a farmer who has a reasonable sized farm the value of which has been depressed or reduced by the very advance of the urban or city sprawl towards it? Its value as agricultural land is being reduced by the very fact that it is in a place that is suitable for building or industrial use because everybody knows that an ideal place for practising agriculture is not a situation in the immediate vicinity of a huge built-up area or any built-up area. Yet if we accept the Bill we are going to compensate the owner on the basis of that sort of use. That is not reasonable.
Furthermore, there is no provision in the Bill for compensation for disturbance. There is very limited provision on page 11 of the Bill, section 23, paragraph VIII, which says:
If any person shall be residing either as owner or tenant on the land acquired by the local authority at the date when the question of compensation is referred to the Tribunal, the Tribunals may award to such persons such compensation for the expenses caused by the removal to other premises as it shall consider just.
That is removal expenses, something like the cost of removing. There is no compensation for disturbance and the loss that that may involve. The limited compensation provided in that paragraph is merely if the person is residing on the land that is being acquired. If, as could well be the case with the sort of land that we are dealing with in an urban area or an urban or city vicinity, he is not living on the land, the land can be taken from him at existing use value and he will not get compensation even for flit. I object to that.
Another objection that I see in this provision for the payment of compensation is that on referring to page 12 of the Bill in section 25 one will find that the local authority may re-sell the land at a profit. I know there must be certain circumstances before they will sell. They can sell the land for industrial purposes at a profit. That is simply outrageous because, not alone are you taking the land from the land owner at existing use value but then you are giving power to the local authority to sell it at a profit. From such information as I can find there has been no bigger dealer of land in this country over the last number of years than Dublin Corporation. I have not got the dates but I understand that Dublin Corporation sold land to the Green Property Company at Blanchardstown at £28,000 an acre having paid £2,000 an acre for it. They sold land to various industries in the county area at £40,000 an acre, having acquired it in part for £1,400 an acre. The corporation have sold tracks of land acquired at agricultural value, roughly, to the Industrial Development Authority for substantial windfall profits. There is nothing in this Bill to indicate that such a policy will not be continued or stopped.
Those provisions in the Bill regarding compensation are not reasonable. If the sponsors of the Bill consider the matter they will agree. I saw reports in a paper recently presenting the Bill to the country as providing compensation on the basis of existing use value plus 25 per cent. There is not one word about a 25 per cent increase over existing use value in the Bill. I do not know where the newspaper concerned got that information. The provision is that it is to be compensated for at existing use value and on the basis that the land could never be used for any other purpose.
I could rhyme off other things which are lacking in the Bill. No account is to be taken of the fact that the land owner is providing the most essential ingredient for the building of a house, which is land. No account is to be taken of the fact that the owner is an unwilling vendor. No account is to be taken of the fact that the acquisition is compulsory. If an unwilling vendor does not re-purchase within 12 months, he will be saddled with a bill for capital gains in certain circumstances. I have dealt with the position in which the local authorities may sell at profit.
Those are the provisions of the Bill which are so fundamental as to compel me and my party to say we cannot support it notwithstanding the fact that we believe something should be done about speculation in land. I am glad the Minister for the Environment is here. If my memory serves me correctly, on a number of occasions since he became Minister, he gave the impression to this House, quite honestly I am sure, that he was about to deal with the Kenny Report and that he was very far advanced in his consideration of that report. I got the impression—I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong but I think the record of the House will bear me out —that within a matter of months he would bring in legislation to deal with the matter. When he contributed to this Bill last night, he gave me the impression that he was as far away as ever if not further from having any solution for the problem.
My party and I feel very strongly about the question of housing prices. It was never so serious. This Government came into power on a manifesto in which they promised to make it cheaper to get a house and easier to keep it but since then the cost of houses has rocketed. The Government of the day should find a solution for a number of factors in regard to housing. A fundamental one is the site. You cannot make omellettes without breaking eggs, and you cannot build a houe without having land. In government, Fine Gael will bring in a policy which will tackle this problem.
I believe the cost of the site amounts to about 15 per cent of the cost of building a house. At first sight I will be contradicted on that figure. I know the figure the professionals give is 35 per cent but that includes the land, professional fees of one sort or another, the cost of developing the land and, I understand, the cost of holding the land from the time it was bought until the house is built. Builders' costs should be looked at. I wonder how well are the certificates of reasonable value working. We believe it is possible to bring down the price of a house to a reasonable sum. The nation as a whole has an input to this. The Bill is asking a comparatively few selected people to become public benefactors. It is not the obligation of individuals to provide houses. It is a national obligation. It is a national obligation to organise and have land available in a serviced condition at a reasonable price.
Many local authorities who service land are inclined to sell it at too big a profit. I hear local authorities talking about providing sites at £9,000. The price was not broken down for me, but it sounds extraordinary to me. The action of the Government and the Minister in turning off the financial tap from the local authorities will drive them to do the type of thing I am complaining about if they are not prohibited from doing so. It will drive them to speculate in land to get some money for the purposes for which they want it and for which the Minister will not provide it. Those are the facts.
As my party see it, the Government have a social obligation to organise matters in such a way that the purchase of a house is within the reach of those people for whom the Government do not propose to build houses. The Government have a fundamental social obligation to provide houses for people who cannot afford to build houses for themselves out of their own resources. They should make sites available.
I doubt that this provision is constitutional. It will be noted that I made just a couple of passing references to the fact that it is unconstitutional because I think that is not a sound way to deal with matters in this House. We should deal with them on their merits. Even if this were constitutional, it would be unfair to take land from genuine bona fide land owners who derive their livelihood from the land, and some of whom have no other way of making a living, and most of whom do not want to be uprooted in middle age or later, on the terms stipulated in this Bill. For that reason I am against it.
The sites should be made available on terms that are fair, equitable and just to genuine landowners, house purchasers and the community in general and there should be no time for land speculators. Any measures that the Minister wants to introduce to discourage land speculation will get the full support of this party.
One thing is certain, the introduction of this Bill has shown dichotomy between Fine Gael and Labour. It has shown positively, once and for all, why coalitions simply do not work—the ideological gap is so enormous. We heard yesterday a very capable speech by Deputy Quinn outlining the socialist ideology of the left advocating confiscation, the taking of the land from the farmers and the giving of minimum compensation. This evening we heard the spokesman for Fine Gael agreeing that the Minister and the Government are right in opposing this Bill. It is extraordinary——
(Cavan-Monaghan): The difference is that I would expect them to do something about it.
I will come to that in a moment. The Deputy spoke about what we did about it. The Coalition, when they were in power, allowed prices to double.
Prices have trebled under Fianna Fáil.
The Kenny Commission was set up by Fianna Fáil, who were aware of the necessity to do something about this problem. In four years the Kenny Report was passed from one side of the ideological chasm to the other, from one part of the Cabinet to the other part of the Cabinet, and no decision was made. The same Kenny Report gathered thick dust and I am glad that——
(Cavan-Monaghan): It is taking Fianna Fáil a long time to shake it off.
——the former Minister, Deputy Tully, is going to speak on this debate. Undoubtedly there is a need to do something about the spiralling cost of houses. But is it only land that is a factor in the cost of the building of houses? Certainly in south Dublin, where there is relatively little building land, when small parcels come on the market they are bought up for expensive houses. A site can fetch up to £30,000. Obviously in the case of south Dublin and other parts of Dublin there is a scarcity of serviced sites and this has accelerated the cost of land in those areas. There is undoubtedly a need to have a look at the Kenny Report, to tease it out. I do not say that we should take the Kenny Report and implement it straight away. I do not think it could be or should be implemented straight away.
Let me speak briefly about houses and house prices. The land is not the whole story. Allowing for anything up to £20,000 an acre at today's prices and a density of 12 to 14 houses, the cost to a builder for a site would be about £1,500. There is a surcharge on that to the local authority for services and so on and the cheapest house that can be bought in Dublin today is about £21,000 or £22,000. Where is the money going? The cost is basically divided between the cost of land, building materials and building labour. Architects' fees are going up; quantity surveyors' fees are going up and all the other incidental costs are going up. I do not want to quibble about any particular section of this Bill, but I do want to say that Deputy Quinn is an able exponent of his theories, as we saw yesterday. There was much merit in some of the things he said, although the cliches became a little obvious. But theory and practice are two different things and it is noticeable that his colleagues in the Labour Party from rural Ireland are not rushing in here to make a contribution. I would be very interested——
I am the Deputy from Ringsend; Deputy Tully is from rural Ireland.
We will see how well he supports the Deputy on this and how many of his colleagues support him. That will be very interesting to see, if the Deputy presses it to a vote.
I have much more support than the Deputy's new Taoiseach.
We have unanimous support for our new Taoiseach here in this House.
That hardly arises on this Bill.
It will be very interesting to see how many supporters the Deputy has on this Bill. I wonder will Deputy Murphy from Cork turn up to support the Deputy. Was there a rift in the Labour Party? I wonder.
I am sorry to disappoint the Deputy.
While I do not want to cast aspersions on anybody's motives I question the wisdom of introducing a Bill of this kind. It is a Bill that is clearly alien to the Irish people. It advocates confiscation of lands. There is no doubt in the world about that. I would suggest that the Labour Party would be better having a look at the role of the speculator, the role of the town planners and the local authorities in enforcing the Planning Acts where we have seen speculators buying land banks in advance, making vast profits, building inadequate and inferior houses and selling them to the consumer at exhorbitant profits. Deputy Quinn would be better looking at that aspect of the question of house prices, housing and general planning. The Labour Party might concentrate more realistically on that, because this whole Bill ignores the tide of history. Last night Deputy Quinn quoted from the writings of James Fintan Lalor with reference to the 19th century land struggle and the landowners of that day. He quoted what Lalor had to say and said that it should be applied line by line today. I do not accept that. Is it fair to compare the ordinary Irish farmer, market gardener or property owner to the robbers and brigands referred to in Lalor's writings? Is it fair to compare today's landlords with the absentee landlord class Lalor had in mind? The comparison is unjust and it does not do justice to Deputy Quinn. He concluded his remarks by quoting the following from James Fintan Lalor:
Against them I assert the true and indefensible right of property—the right of our people to live in this land and possess it, to live in it in security comfort and independence.
Would Deputy Quinn's Bill guarantee this? It certainly would not. Instead of the security they now possess they would have the insecurity of tenure proposed in this Bill. They could be dispossessed without adequate compensation.
I certainly do not wish to question Deputy Quinn's motives but I do question his wisdom. Many builders here make massive profits out of speculation, but this is a factor that was referred to in the Kenny Report in which there was reference to ways and means of dealing with the problem.
We all know that land is a very sensitive subject in Ireland. Obviously, Deputy Quinn is aware of this though he is not sufficiently temperate to consider the implications of what he is now suggesting. Last evening the Deputy spoke of social justice, of building into bricks and mortar great social inequality and inequity but this Bill illustrates in a striking way the pitfalls for those who may opt for the easy solution to a very vexed problem. Account must be taken of the constitutional, administrative and financial structures but that has not been done in the preparation of this Bill. It would seem that Deputy Quinn and some, if not all members of his party, have chosen not only to ignore these difficulties but to propose solutions that run counter to the Kenny Report.
There is a long history of attempts to find solutions to the problems of the inadequate supply of land. In Britain, for instance, different proposals have been tried in this regard for 80 years or more. Various pieces of legislation aimed at solving the problem were introduced both under Tory and under Labour Governments there. In the fifties there was enacted legislation in this regard which was very quickly rescinded. Other pieces of legislation in this area met with the same fate. Therefore, the history of efforts to bring equity into the area of land for housing is not good. It has fallen in Britain and it will fall here unless we tease out the various items referred to in the Kenny Report.
We shall do that at Committee Stage.
With respect, I do not think the Deputy's Bill is on and he must have been told this in his own party. It might be well to refer briefly to what was done by the Coalition Government in regard to the Kenny Report. Almost a year after being returned to office, the Coalition issued a statement on that report, accepting in principle the concept as suggested in the report. In that statement they indicated also that the problem of the high cost of building land was a difficult and complex one and one which would involve remedies that would be both far-reaching and comprehensive. They indicated that before taking final decisions on many of the more important matters of detail they would take into account the views of interested parties. Among the matters left over for decision were the amount of compensation that would be payable in designated areas and the question of who would be the designating authority. There was no further decision from the Coalition so far as the Kenny Report was concerned. Apparently they did not give any consideration to that report. It is interesting to see the Deputy who at that time was Minister for Local Government sitting now beside the proposer of this, to say the least, unusual Bill.
In May 1976 the then Minister for Local Government decided to defer implementation of the Kenny Report proposals in view of the then prevailing economic and fiscal circumstances. The general economic recession which set in in 1974 and which continued through 1975 and 1976 precluded a commitment of financial resources to implement the Kenny Report proposals. It was considered necessary by the then Government to conserve scarce financial resources for priority capital works that would stimulate and maintain employment. There was no further consideration given to the Kenny Report by the Coalition during the period in which they remained in office. It is interesting to note that in a summing up of the Coalition's activity in a report in The Irish Times on Monday last, it was stated that after accepting the Kenny Report and announcing publicly that its proposals would be implemented with haste the Coalition let it fade into oblivion. That is the crux of the matter. It is why coalitions have brought nothing but despair, gloom, disunity and a lack of harmony to our nation. In this context I am glad to note that for the first time the Leader of Fine Gael has accepted publicly that coalitions cannot work because of the ideological differences involved. These differences are immense. The people of Ireland should realise that there could not be any unity with a government of that kind. It is not possible that a government composed of people whose views are far to the left and of others who hold views that are far to the right would work.
What about the Taoiseach?
We are discussing a Bill dealing with building land. We are not discussing the merits or otherwise of coalition governments.
We must tease out the differences.
I shall reply later to what is being said by the Deputy but I shall not interrupt him now because he is making my speech for me.
During four years in office the Deputy did nothing about the Kenny report.
I shall explain that, too.
What have Fianna Fáil done about it in three years?
We are all concerned about the question of the rising cost of houses and the prime concern in any legislation that proposes to tackle the problem of the cost of land for building purposes should be to ensure that in so far as possible such land is available at reasonable prices for local authority houses. It would be desirable also to ensure that in so far as possible the increase in the value of land resulting from the provision of local authority infrastructure will be to the benefit of the public. At the same time care should be taken to avoid a position whereby the adoption of what appears to be a solution has the opposite result, in other words a solution that causes a scarcity of building land or results in a shift of the price element to the house purchaser despite the establishment of an expensive bureaucratic machine.
Last evening, too, Deputy Quinn quoted selectively Article 43 of the Constitution but he failed to emphasise what should be emphasised in that context, that is, that Article 43 guarantees the right to private ownership. Regardless of whether Deputy Quinn or anybody else would wish the situation to be otherwise, our society accepts the concept of free enterprise as a basic element of the democratic structure. This being so, it is inevitable that the price of building land will be determined in general by the operation of the principle of supply and demand.
The eradication of speculation in land has proved a very difficult proposition. Solutions which might succeed also bring about the withholding of land from the market. It should be remembered that our private building industry produces an output in houses far in excess of the public sector. In 1979 the output in the private sector was estimated to be £363 million, while local authority housing output was estimated at £82 million. If a solution were introduced which would discourage private investment in housing, or adversely affect the house building industry, any loss on the private side would have to be made good by the public side, with the burden falling on the Exchequer and on the taxpayer. I understand—but am open to correction on this—that one of the reasons why Fine Gael opposed the Bill was that it was utterly and completely unreasonable in the matter of compensation. If farmers were to be compensated as is proposed in this Bill, in all probability they would find themselves in greatly reduced circumstances. If they wished to purchase land elsewhere and continue as farmers the uprooting would cause untold compensation problems. They would not get adequate compensation. Adequate compensation, as suggested in this Bill, has wide implications to anybody who has a bit of land. It appears to be simply another effort by the Labour Party to drive a wedge between rural Ireland and urban Ireland. It may, of course, be that the Labour Party have decided to write off their chances in rural Ireland and concentrate in the next General Election on the urban area and the cities where they have a selected trendy group who are apparently dissatisfied with the democratic free enterprise system and have banded around the Labour Party. I would urge Deputy Quinn to consider——
We are touched by the Deputy's interest in us. I am sure he is worried about us.
As I said earlier, I would be very interested to see how many Members of the Labour Party disport themselves through the lobbies to support any section of this Bill.
If the Deputy comes here next Wednesday, he will be able to count them.
We shall come here next Wednesday night for certain, to count them, every one of them.
The Deputies should stay on the Land Bill which is before the House.
The record should show that the Deputy has managed to talk about everything except the actual provisions of the Bill.
I am talking about aspects of the provisions of the Bill. I am talking about the basis on which the Bill was presented to this House. This is not necessary and the Deputy would be better withdrawing the Bill altogether and reconsidering what I have suggested that he should reconsider in the best interests of the people he represents. Is he out of touch with the reality of the Irish people?
We are dealing with a building land Bill at the moment.
Our Constitution has served us well over the years. It has had some difficulties which have been rectified when necessary. It will protect us and serve its purpose over the years to come. It will protect us from alien ideologies being imposed upon us. If this Bill by some chance found acceptance in this House and became law, I do not believe that the President could sign it without reference to the Supreme Court. If it went to the Supreme Court, it would get very short shrift there and would be thrown out in a day or two. It is a complete waste of time of this House to bring in a Bill of this kind here. Deputy Quinn is not a simple man. He is a clever exponent of his theories. I wonder why he should take up the time of the House discussing a Bill that he knows in his heart and soul is unconstitutional.
I believe it very much to be constitutional.
The Deputy would have to convince me and a lot of others about it.
There is a very simple test. Send it to the Supreme Court, if you want to have it checked out.
I am satisfied that the Minister has stated his case fully and comprehensively as regards this Bill. I do not need to dwell on the sections of it, as Deputy Quinn suggested I should. I congratulate the Minister on his statement.
Deputy Quinn mentioned an increase of 5,000 per cent between 1938 and 1971 in the cost of land in County Dublin. He appears to insinuate that all this increase was caused by land speculators.
No.
He takes an example of land sold during the worst depression in the world's history and has at no stage mentioned inflation. I shall give another example. In 1979 Dublin Corporation acquired, by agreement, a total of 225 acres of land. The price paid for this land was about £10,000 an acre. Would Dublin Corporation or any other local authority be able to acquire land by agreement under the provisions of this Bill? In theory, yes; in practice, what would happen? Does any Member of this House in full control of his or her senses think that the Irish people would accept this Bill or that the farmers in rural Ireland would accept this Bill? This is an attack on the fundamental process of democracy. It is an alien Bill and one of the worst which has come into this House. It is an attack on a system which we have so cherished over the years. It is a wrong approach to a real problem.
I gather that the people in Lucan are very keen to have a Bill like this, curiously enough.
As I said before, Dublin Corporation and Dublin County Council are controlled by Labour and Fine Gael, famous bedpartners well known for wrecking things.
Dublin County Council has nothing to do with a building land Bill. The Deputy has about a minute to go.
I shall conclude by quoting for the record from the Kenny report, page 27, paragraph 56:
We have been unable to find any workable system by which the price of all building land could be controlled. Price control can operate successfully only when applied to commodities which can be classified by reference to characteristics such as their composition, size or weight. But land cannot be classified because each acre has unique features which may affect the price. (How much is to be allowed for a view of the mountains?) Therefore any system of price control of land involves ultimately the fixing by an independent tribunal of a fair price or a market price for each piece of land involved. This would mean that an elaborate structure of tribunals would have to be established and this would be costly, cumbersome and slow. We therefore reject price control of land as such as a solution.
That is the Kenny Report.
It is only right to put on record that what Deputy N. Andrews was quoting a few moments ago was the minority report of the Kenny Report, the minority report to the Minister for Finance. They held that opinion. There was a majority report, with which obviously Deputy Andrews does not agree, whose members thought entirely differently.
Deputy Tully did not do anything about it anyway.
I hate people who come into this House and start trying to bluff their way through, as did Deputy Andrews. He quoted from the Kenny Report, giving the impression that he was quoting from the majority report when in fact he was quoting from the minority report.
Listening to speakers here this evening I got the impression that they are very like, in one way at least, Saint Augustine: Oh, Lord, make me pure, but not just yet. They all want land prices controlled. They want established a fair price for land. They want house prices rendered cheaper by having lower prices for sites. But they do not want to do it now; some other time somebody else will do it. Indeed, listening to the discussion here this evening one would get the impression that the Simon Pures of politics all sat on the Fianna Fáil benches. It was extremely amusing to hear Deputy N. Andrews reverting to an old cliché I thought had died a long time ago. It illustrates how short he was of comment on the Bill when he started back on the old theme, the alien philosophy, reds under the beds. For goodness sake would he grow up?
I should like to place on record a few things which have been misrepresented here this evening so that we will know where we stand. First of all, the Kenny Report was commissioned in 1971 by the Fianna Fáil Government. I took office in the Department of Local Government on 14 March 1973. The Kenny Report was not made available to me; it was made available to my predecessor and did not come into my hands until almost the end of the year. To suggest that it was in my possession from March, 1973—as indeed was suggested a few days ago in the newspapers—is something I should like to kill here and now.
Secondly, we did have the report studied. The Minister has available to him in the Department quite a substantial amount of work done on the Kenny Report. But when one talks of the Kenny Report many people seem to think it is the be all and end all of land control or price control of land. In my opinion the one big weakness of the Kenny Report was that it did not touch at all on urban sites. This Bill does. I agree with Deputy Andrews that the scandal of urban site prices is one of the things that must be tackled fairly quickly. We see now broken down coal yards and piggeries having been rented for a couple of shillings a week being offered as sites at £250,000 overnight. Yet people here seem to consider that there is no necessity whatsoever to deal with this matter now. The attitude is: Oh, deal with it sometime—Saint Augustine again—but not just yet.
If the Minister is really serious about controlling land prices there is no point in pointing the finger at the Coalition and saying: you had it for years. We had it for three years but let it not be forgotten that the Minister has had it on his table now for three years, with a lot of work having been done on it, and he has done absolutely nothing about it——
That is not correct.
——good, bad or indifferent. Well, if he has got something done about it, why did he not make an intelligent comment on Deputy Quinn's opening statement here yesterday evening instead of the waffle we had from him? There was no reference whatever made to the Bill or what was proposed to be done with regard to the control of land prices——
The Deputy is not serious.
Rather it appeared to have been a matter of filling in half an hour's time and letting it go at that. That appears to have been the object of the exercise.
As far as the price of land is concerned, Deputy Fitzpatrick was perfectly right. There are two types of people who own land, farmers who want to work their land and those who have land, who would be just as happy doing something else and, if they can get out having made a quick buck, that is all right. But the trouble about it is that very often it happens, particularly around our cities, towns and villages, that there is a situation in which a local authority spend an enormous amount of money on water and sewerage schemes. Then one of the non-farmers who own land, some speculator, or some so-called respectable person, having the necessary money will acquire the land. As soon as the job is finished, they sell it. But who pays the enormous amount which has been paid for that land to the speculator? Not the person who buys it to develop houses? No, it is the unfortunates who purchase the houses and who subsequently must pay by way of repayment of loans. Remember it is public money, which has been spent on the provision of water and sewerage for those sites. Yet the profit on that land is picked up by somebody who moves on to look for greener pastures in a couple of months' time, finding some other place they can do the same thing and get away with it if they possibly can. There is no use at all trying to brush it under the carpet.
Perhaps the Bill is not perfect. Seldom is a Bill prepared by a party in opposition perfect. But to say simply that the Government are not prepared to accept it, full stop, is not good enough. I can assure the Minister that when this Bill is voted down, as probably it will be, he will not have heard the end of it, because once this has been started it must be continued. We heard this ridiculous nonsense about taking away the rights of the farmer, that we were trying to take his land from him. At present land can be acquired from people who have land around our cities and towns and they have the right, if they are not satisfied with its price, to have it fixed. But we do not think they are entitled for land at present valued at £1,000 or £2,000 an acre to pick up, say, £10,000, £15,000, £20,000 or perhaps more. The only way to stop it is by legislation passed in this House.
The Minister, and indeed Deputy Andrews, referred to the fact that I did not do anything about it, when I was in the Department. I can tell both of them this: there were so many things to be done after 16 years of Fianna Fáil misrule, things that had to be straightened out in the Department of Local Government. If they want to have a look at the record they will see what was done. They will see we were really working fulltime in an effort to get matters straightened out. But again we were in the midst of what Deputy Andrews referred to a few moments ago as the worst recession the world had experienced for a long time.
I was referring to 1938 and that period.
Well the Deputy can refer to 1973, 1974 and 1975 when the world experienced its worst recession for a long time, the worst the western world had experienced since 1929. Yet in spite of that we were able to get things going. What has happened now? What excuse has the Minister now? I know he will say that of course there is a recession now. He will tell us how the cost of oil has pushed up the price of everything and he cannot do things he would like to do. But when we were in power Fianna Fáil were not prepared to accept that. Every day they tried to blame on our Government things that were happening because of outside influences. Now they come along moaning to us that outside influences are preventing them from doing many things. I am prepared to admit that many things have been held up because of outside influences. This is something that could be dealt with by the Government if they had the will. They have not got the will.
In relation to Dublin inner city development, in 1968 an effort was made to have a CPO sanctioned—it had been passed by the city council—by the then Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government. It related to a coalyard in City Quay. The Minister refused to sanction it though there were many people awaiting houses there. Later the matter came before me in my time as Minister and I sanctioned a second C.P.O. Some of the houses have since been built and some of them are occupied. Three years ago that coalyard cost £100,000. It could have been bought for £200 in 1968 if the Minister then and the Government had the courage to put a name at the bottom of a piece of paper.
That has been the attitude of Fianna Fáil. This Bill deals with the acquisition of sites for local authority houses. I have been checking with a number of local authorities and I find that there will not be a start made on the building of any local authority houses this year. Houses which local authorities were ready to start last year were not allocated any money if a beginning had not been made by 31 March last. There is no money for housing. Managers of housing authorities are sending letters to the Minister begging and imploring him to give them money to finish houses already started. In December 1976 Deputy Lynch, then Leader of the Opposition, said here that the Coalition Government were building too many local authority houses.
He did not say that.
He said that by comparison with private housing too many local authority houses were being built. Does that satisfy Deputy Moore?
We are getting away from the Bill.
I do not think so.
The Chair believes we are.
The Chair is not inside my mind so he cannot understand the case I am trying to develop. I am asking him to allow me to do so.
We are not having a debate on housing. The Deputy may refer to the cost of housing as a result of the price of land but he may not discuss housing in general.
I cannot make the case I want to make if I am not allowed by the Chair to develop my argument. My argument is that the cost of local authority housing now will be so high that the Minister will not have any trouble keeping to the decision taken by Fianna Fáil a few years ago in Opposition that they would not continue to build local authority houses. None can be built this year and next year we will be told that local authority houses cannot be built because the cost of sites will be too high. During my time as Minister there were comments by Fianna Fáil about the cost of sites in the Dublin inner city area. They said that the inner city could not be developed because the cost of sites was too high.
When it is a question of housing our people we should not think of costs being too high. People who need houses must have them and if they cannot provide them themselves the responsibility lies fairly and squarely on the Government of the day. The Minister or anyone else from his party should not try to put it across on this House that houses cannot be built because the site costs are too high at a time when the Minister has not been taking the necessary steps to try to control the price of sites. Is it not ludicrous that in any part of the country a young couple wanting to build their own house, who have been saving perhaps £3,000 or £4,000, when they go on the market find that that money will not buy a site for them even in a country area, not to talk of the cities or towns? That being so, there is no reason why the Government should allow a group of people to get away with rack renting, getting money for land which they may have had for a long time or which they may have recently acquired, making big profits. It does not stop there because these profits are made from the unfortunate people who will eventually buy houses built from that land.
At one time we heard complaints about the high cost of building materials and when a wage round was being negotiated we were told if an increase of twopence or threepence an hour was conceded it would push up the cost of houses and people would not be able to afford them. Now we have a situation where a group of people, many of them completely unconnected with the building industry, can pick up colossal sums of money and slide off with it. If such people are lucky enough to be able to acquire another site, another bit of land, cheaply somewhere else they will repeat their practice.
It can be said that if people sell land cheaply it is their own fault. A man came to me not so long ago and told me he had sold 12 acres of land for £24,000. He understood he was selling it to a building contractor, but a month after the sale he discovered that the man who had bought it is a speculator who later sold the land to a building contractor for £72,000. He asked me if I could do anything about it. I told him he had been satisfied with the £24,000 at the time of the sale and that it was just his hard luck. Worse still, houses have since being built on the land and although there is a CRV in operation, the contractor who built the houses produced documents which proved the value of the site, in my opinion an exorbitant value, far above what it should be. Many of the people in those houses are friends of mine and have told me about the very high repayments they have to make on their loans. That contractor probably spends six months every year in the Canary Islands. So well he can. He has got a lot of money, he has not to work, he just worked his head for a short while and got away with it.
If that were simply an isolated case one could say that the original owner of that land was foolish, but this has been happening over and over again throughout the country. We find people who owned bits of land being approached by people who through a grapevine hear that public water supplies or sewerage schemes have been planned for the neighbourhood. Those people chase that farmer for that land, buy it rather cheaply, eventually the sewerage and water are installed and suddenly those who bought the land are very rich.
This Bill aims to put an end to that sort of thing. People should not be allowed to make colossal sums of money in land speculation when they have not done a thing to provide the infrastructure which makes the land valuable.
We have an extraordinary situation here. One could pass through Dublin city and not realise what the situation is. There are thousands of young people—some of them not so young— married couples living in what can only be described as hovels with no hope of ever having homes of their own, either to buy or to be provided by the corporation. The reason is that the sites on which their houses should be built are being held by some greedy persons living in comfortable homes, held until they get the price they want.
This Bill would put the fear of God in those people. It would make them develop the sites or get rid of them quickly. It is ridiculous that this situation should have been allowed to continue for so long. During my time as Minister I tried to get a tax put on derelict sites. It is a sin to see such sites being left there for years when people could be living in houses built there. I had a good laugh on one occasion when a newspaper reported a tax was being imposed on derelict sites. The following morning in one area there were signs reading "This site to be developed by July 1976". Those people were afraid they would be caught.
If the Minister tries to end this speculation he will have the full support of the Labour Party. If he does not, we will do everything we can to have this matter righted in another way. This Bill may not be perfect, but a lot of time and attention was spent drafting it. If the Minister had stood up yesterday and gone through this Bill section by section, as Deputy Fitzpatrick did, I could understand it. But the Minister did not. All he did was make a report which did not say anything except that Fianna Fáil would vote against the Bill and that they would not let it go any further. That is not good enough.
When people are in a tight corner they attempt to get out of it by quoting the Kenny Report. In my opinion the Kenny Report is as near to being adopted and turned into legislation as it was when I left office. The Minister has a lot of material which his very excellent staff dug out for me, and subsequently for him. That documentation is there. If he has the will to do something about this he will do it, but he sits back and listens to his colleagues in the Cabinet who have no interest in rehousing the poor. If he does that, we can expect continuation of this racket.
I appeal to the Minister to look at this report. There is not, as Deputy Andrews suggested, a pile of dust on it. It is very actively considered for a long time. The three years the Minister has been in office is a very long time and a considerable amount of dust may have gathered during that time if it has not been disturbed.
That is not right.
I will accept the Minister's word that something has been done about it if somebody, during this debate, can give an inkling if legislation is to be introduced to implement the Kenny Report or to bring in a Bill to control this scandal. I do not have to ask the Minister if he has the heads of a Bill because I am sure he has not. If he had it would have been in his brief last night. I am afraid it is simply a question of putting this off. As far as the Government were concerned, this was just another Bill and their idea was to get out of it the handiest way possible. That is not the way to deal with these matters.
Let me go back to a comment made by Deputy Andrews about the alien influence. He suggested that the Labour Party proposed to go out and grab the land from the farmers. Fianna Fáil did damn well out of that in 1969 and it was as big a lie then as it is now. We have no intention of attempting to take land from the farmers or from anybody else against their will but we hold, and will continue to hold, that there is no way somebody who owns by accident a portion of land, which a local authority require to build local authority houses, should be allowed to hold on to it and force the price up so that when the houses are built their cost to the State, to the local authority and to the tenant is far too high for anyone to bear. It is as simple as that.
I want to discuss the cities, because we have similar situations in Dublin, Galway, Cork, Limerick and Waterford. There are ideal sites in the middle of these cities which could be acquired if the people who own them got the value of the sites for which they are using them. They would not be able to look into the sky, think of a figure and demand that it should be paid. The result is that at present these sites are not built on. We believe the answer is to allow this Bill through, to amend it where it is considered necessary, or if it is not workable to come up with a reasonable alternative. There is no way we will accept from the Government that they are doing their duty by sitting back and allowing the Bill to be debated here, throwing in an odd snide remark and going back to where they came from and ignoring the fact that there is a demand for local authority houses but that the sites are not available.
An example of what can be done when the proper approach is made can be seen in the Coombe, City Quay and the cattle market. I was delighted to be able to make available the necessary money and sanctions to have houses built in those areas. No more are such houses being built because, apart from the fact that there does not appear to be any money, the sites cannot be acquired as the owners feel they should become millionaires overnight at the expense of Dublin's poor, not at the expense of the State. The poor who require housing will be left in the cold as a result of the inaction of a Government which seem to be bankrupt of everything including ideas.
Debate adjourned.