I welcome the Minister, Deputy Browne, to the House.
Housing: Statements
I welcome the opportunity to speak to the Seanad today on the challenges we face as a country as we work to build on the progress achieved under the Housing for All plan and to secure a housing system that meets the needs of our society.
I recently outlined a broad housing policy agenda in the Dáil with reference to the Government's work on the report of the Housing Commission. I hope to take a similar approach here today. In doing so, I will outline the progress achieved since Housing for All was published in September 2021, the Government's ambition to build on that progress and the challenges we face in doing so, as well as, most important, some of the key measures we will bring forward as we strive to meet and address the challenges we face.
It is important to start by reflecting on the progress we have made in recent years. In many ways, we are still recovering from the deep wounds inflicted on the housing system during and shortly after the great financial crisis. It is easy to forget that only ten or so years ago, we built only 7,200 new homes in the State. Remarkably, in the decade since, we have increased this significantly to an annual average of almost 31,000 new homes in the past three years. Despite the almost continuous upward trajectory in supply through this period, there have been some recent disappointments, most notably the dip in the number of new homes built last year. This in particular brings into stark relief the enormous task of securing enough housing to meet our needs.
That said, it is important to recall how far we have come in a relatively short period of time. In 2012 and 2013, we delivered less than 5,000 new homes each year. By 2020 and 2021, this had increased to 20,500 new-build homes added to the national housing stock in each of these years and, a short three years later, an undeniably significant step change in delivery has been achieved, with more than 92,000 new homes built from 2022 to 2024.
More social homes are being delivered than in many years. Measures like the first home scheme, help to buy scheme, the local authority home loan, the relaxation of social housing income eligibility limits and the introduction of the renters' credit have all helped younger people to achieve autonomy in the housing market. Government measures on rent regulation and tenant in situ schemes have also successfully protected tenants and shielded vulnerable households from homelessness.
At the same time, we must be honest and acknowledge housing remains an existential challenge. We bear witness to the consequences of this every day. The number of new homes coming on stream each year is far short of where it needs to be. The result is a limited availability in choice, affordability challenges for those seeking independence in the housing market, social housing lists that remain stubbornly high and growing numbers of homeless households. We do not underestimate the challenge facing us, nor do we resile from it. We remain steadfast in our commitment to meet the challenge head on and ensure all those aspiring to independence in the housing market can realise their aspiration.
Building new homes remains a key priority for our Government. Increased supply remains the answer to many of the problems we face.
We have committed to delivering 300,000 new homes between 2025 and 2030, targeting at least 60,000 homes annually by the end of the period. When achieved, as a frame of reference, this will be more than double the 133,000 homes built in the past five years. The new targets are ambitious but they provide a credible pathway to delivering the scale of housing needed. The targets are not a ceiling. We plan to revisit them in 2027 and if, reflecting demand and growing industry capacity, we need different targets for 2028 and subsequent years, we will revise them. Our immediate focus must be on achieving these targets. To this end, the programme for Government commits to a new national housing plan to build on the success of Housing for All. The plan will incorporate pragmatic actions to boost housing activity in the short term, as well as strategic delivery boosts that will implement systemic change and help achieve and sustain the levels of supply needed in the long term.
We can all agree planning remains a critical piece of the solution. We are close to finalising the first revision to the national planning framework, NPF, and I expect the revision to be completed in the coming weeks, subject to Government agreement and thereafter the approval of both Houses. The revised NPF will set out the need to plan for the delivery of 50,000 new homes every year until 2040 and provide local authorities with the scope to zone the land needed to reach these targets. The new Planning and Development Act represents a radical reform of the planning system and will be commenced on a phased basis over the next 18 months. The new Act will bring greater clarify and certainty for those navigating the planning system. For example, new statutory timelines for decision-making and streamlined judicial review processes will help to reduce the delays that may be constraining supply and ensure investment decision can be made knowing when a decision on a planning application may be forthcoming.
Infrastructure is at the centre of the Government's programme. A new strategic housing activation office is being established under my remit. The new office will ensure timely provision of the enabling infrastructure needed for public and private housing development while addressing unnecessary infrastructure delays and blockages within the system. Work to establish this office is well advanced and recent engagement with key stakeholders has reinforced the importance of getting this office up and running urgently. The office will manage the significant housing infrastructure component of the new towns and cities investment fund. This will be agreed as part of the upcoming review of the national development plan. We are committed to investing in capital for Uisce Éireann to reach the levels of housing supply envisaged and deliver an average of 50,000 new houses every year between now and the end of the decade.
The State has invested unprecedented levels of public money in the delivery of housing in recent years and we intend to continue to do so. With that said, as much as some do not like hearing it, there is just no getting away from the fact the State cannot go it alone. Much of the investment needed to meet our needs has to come from the private sector, financed through the appropriate sources of private capital, a lot of which will come from international sources. We need to look no further than last year's dip in new home completions, which we all know was driven largely by the fall in the number of new apartments. To appreciate the importance of private investment, it has been three years since we carried out a review of apartments. This is an outcome inextricably linked to the almost full retreat of international capital in the sector since 2022. This capital is critical to apartment delivery, particularly from the private rental sector. Many of the apartments delivered last year were State led, and while this secured much-needed social, cost-rental and affordable housing, it is not sustainable in the long term. A stable and certain policy environment will help attract the private investment needed, and a review and potential recalibration and reimagining of rent pressure zones will be critical in this regard.
Whatever our direction of travel, our approach will seek to strike the right balance between protecting affordability for renters, on the one hand, while encouraging new investment in the residential construction sector, on the other. We can both protect renters and attract sustainable long-term investment and finance to finance new homes for rent. We have no choice but to do so. I have taken the initial time available to me to document the recent progress as well as some of the more substantial measures we are progressing and will progress in the coming years as we strive to relieve the pressures in the housing system. The forthcoming national housing plan will encompass many additional strands of work, including ambitious targets for social and affordable starter and cost-rental homes, addressing the homelessness challenge, boosting the capacity of the construction sector, our local authority housing delivery teams and approved bodies, and continuing to reduce vacancy and bring much-needed stock back into use. The plan will also focus on policies and structures that set us on a more sustainable and resilient footing as we seek to secure a long-term pipeline of delivery and funding to 2030 and beyond.
Out of necessity, the plan will follow the review of the national development plan, which will be completed in July. In the meantime, I will continue to engage with Government colleagues including the Minister, Deputy Chambers, as the latter review takes shape over the coming months, making the case to reaffirm the critical importance of housing as recognised in the previous national development plan review.
I again thank Senators for inviting me to speak to them today. I look forward to hearing their views over the coming two hours and to engaging with them further on ideas and possible solutions to the difficulties we face.
I thank the Minister for coming to the House today and for facilitating an early debate on housing for this Seanad. It is the single biggest threat to far too many of our citizens' lives, young and old. I really appreciate and I believe the House really appreciates the priority the Government and the Minister, in his new Ministry, are giving to housing. I wish him well. He has our absolute support.
When I say it is the biggest challenge facing this generation I speak as a mother of three young adults. I live with their experience of it. I was first elected as a local authority member back in 2004, however, so I have more than 20 years' perspective on the housing challenge. When I was privileged enough to be nominated by the Taoiseach in 2020 as the Fianna Fáil housing spokesperson in the Seanad, I took on that task. I was proud to take it on to try to address a decade of undersupply, which the Minister himself mentioned. The challenge was to change housing policy, housing legislation and housing funding. As we begin the debate today, it can feel daunting because it is a huge challenge to get to 300,000 new homes, to make that commitment and deliver on it. It is worth acknowledging, however, the progress that was made over the past four years. That is important because the statistics do not lie. It is not a lie to say that, in the four years, the legislation, policy and funding changed. Funding increased from less than €500 million a year to more than €4 billion a year. Legislation changed so that local authorities had the power to build homes, not just social homes but affordable homes to purchase and to rent. We introduced affordable cost rental. We put the Land Development Agency on a statutory footing so that State-owned lands could be used to deliver homes for our people.
In that period, more than 130,000 new homes were built, as the Minister himself mentioned. In some of the years in the previous decade, fewer than 7,000 homes were built. That 130,000 new homes were built meant 16,000 individuals and families were either prevented from entering homelessness or exited homelessness because the supply was increasing. Importantly, the supply of social homes was increasing. More than 42,000 social homes were delivered and more than 12,000 local authority voids, that is, the vacant boarded-up flats you might see around Dublin city or in other towns, were brought back into productive use as family homes.
The vacant and derelict property grants which were introduced had more than 11,000 applications. They have been a huge success. They give funding to individuals to take a vacant property and turn it into their home. Last year a record number of first-time buyers drew down a mortgage. More than 26,000 individuals and families drew down a mortgage for the first time. That equated to more than 500 first-time buyers every week drawing down a mortgage.
Renters' protections were strengthened. Rent caps were enforced. A €1,000 renter's tax credit was introduced for 400,000 renters for the first time. Affordable cost rental as a model of housing was introduced.
The Minister is right: the output last year was disappointing in the end. The last quarter did not perform in the way we all wanted it to. The pipeline is strong, however, and we should be encouraged by the fact that, in the year to February, more than 64,000 homes commenced. That is a good, important and strong pipeline. Housing construction in Ireland is at the highest levels in Europe. We can take encouragement from that.
I do not think any of us can get comfortable or start sitting on our laurels but we need to acknowledge that in the past four years, we had Covid, Brexit and war in Europe, which we had not experienced in decades. Our population increased and our economy came back stronger after Covid. We are at full employment and purchasing power is at its highest. The way we live has changed. We no longer live four to six people in a household but one to three people in a household, so there is a doubling of the housing requirement. This State stepped up to the plate, increased supply and innovated by introducing affordable cost rental housing, giving powers to local authorities and the Land Development Agency, and using modern methods of construction.
We have a bigger challenge in this term - I do not envy the Minister's task - because we have to get to over 300,000 new homes by 2030. We have a commitment as a State to eliminate homelessness by 2030. That is a commitment made by the State and it is a big challenge. The only way we can do that is by increasing supply.
In the few minutes of speaking time I have left, I would like to mention some areas we would like the Minister and the Government to focus on. We need to massively scale up to the next level in order to get to the 60,000 homes a year that are needed. This necessitates an all-of-government approach. The Minister has my admiration and support but he and his Department cannot do this on their own; they need the support of all of the Government. When we wanted to solve Covid, we treated it like an emergency. The State made choices that were, at times, unpopular and uncomfortable for people. This was necessary because we all wanted to defeat Covid and get to a safe place. I believe that everybody in this Government wants to get to a safe place where every one of our citizens has access to a home that is adequate and meets their needs. This is why I speak of an all-of-government approach. Such an approach involves the Department of Finance. I mention that Department first because it knows that it will cost somewhere in the region of €24 billion a year to fix the housing crisis. We need the Department of Finance because it has the finance experts and we need it to come forward with proposals to help us to fix this. We can do a certain amount but the Department of Finance will have to play a very significant role.
The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media has to come to the table with the legislation, the regulations and the controls on short-term lets. I am not talking about letting a room in one's home on Airbnb; I am talking about full family homes, particularly in this city. At a time when families are living in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation, there are tourists living or staying in family homes. It is wrong and has to be stopped.
I fully support and I would like to hear more about the Minister's strategic housing delivery office. It is really important and a great initiative on the part of the Minister. That office, along with the all-of-government approach I have mentioned,, should help us to meet our objective of achieving our commitments in the Lisbon Declaration on the European Platform on Combatting Homelessness.
It is very important to recognise that last year alone, the financial cost of emergency homeless accommodation was somewhere in the region of €360 million. While that is a very large figure, it does not reflect the human cost of emergency accommodation, and the instability and insecurity of it. Everything must be done to achieve our commitments under the Lisbon declaration by 2030. That includes the declustering of emergency accommodation in the inner city. It is not sustainable for the individuals who are being accommodated there or for the community.
On the one-size-fits-all housing approach to the country, I believe that a specific intervention is needed for the capital and the inner city. Nurses working in the Rotunda, Mater and Temple Street hospitals, gardaí working in Store Street, the Bridewell and Mountjoy, and teachers working in St. Peter's National School and all across the city are travelling from Louth, Wicklow, Meath and Wexford, which is not sustainable. My constituency of Dublin Central has a population of 120,000 people. Every single working day, that population increases to over half a million people. That means that there are 400,000 people coming in every day, many of them to work. Why is that? It is because there is not a sufficient supply of homes.
That brings me to my next point. The vacant and derelict homes grants which were introduced for €50,000 and €70,000 have been a great success. There have been over 11,000 applicants already. Those grants need to be continued. The over-the-shop grant also needs to be introduced and increased. When someone is refitting an over-the-shop property, there are building regulations and fire regulations that have to be complied with, and there are additional costs. It would open up spaces in cities, towns and villages throughout the country.
On the topic of apartments, as the Minister mentioned, those in the Opposition who campaigned and drove out investment in the building of apartments in our country should hang their heads in shame. There are 55,000 planning applications for apartments that have not progressed because of the agitation by those in the Opposition who basically undermined and destabilised the environment for any investment in the provision of homes. We have to have apartments building for our urban areas. There is a place for them. It is not for every community setting, but in the city we need it.
I look forward to the rest of the debate and thank the Minister for his time today.
I welcome the Minister. It is the first time I have had the opportunity to meet him in the Chamber. It is a huge, onerous task as Senator Fitzpatrick said. I do not want to spend my ten minutes looking back and I do not want to engage in a blame game. We have to recognise that we have a crisis and we have to do something about it.
The State, the Government, the Opposition and whoever else is involved in this need to work in a collaborative way with the local authorities, the construction companies, the public sector and the private sector because, quite frankly, people do not give a damn who is building the houses. We want to build homes and we want to build sustainable communities. That is the bottom line for people. There has to be a synergy between the public and private sector. Let us get out of all this ideology of public versus private because it has not got us very far. There are synergies and we can tap into experience and finance from both the private and public sector. That is the way to go, and the Minister has indicated that. There needs to be a significant increase in what I like to call public housing. I do not think we have got our understanding of the Vienna model out of our heads yet. Vienna is a very nice place to be, but the Vienna model is public housing rent based on one's disposable income. That is what it is about. People can be proud and are proud to live in public housing. They want secure tenure and they want fair rent. That is very important.
I often think of the amount of equity, finance and capital we have tied up in private homes in Ireland, because we are so obsessed with ownership of homes. If only some of that was put into enterprise and other venture capital projects, what a different country we might have. I understand the preoccupation and the desire to own your home, but that is another issue for another day. We need to target our resources.
I had the opportunity to meet the Planning Regulator at an event the other day and he said something to me which I thought about and emailed him about it the next day. We refer to the Dublin local authority building bulletin quarterly reports, which the Minister will be well aware of. I had not seen the last one. I double-checked with the Planning Regulator on the figures and printed off the report today so I was fully aware of the facts. It is a report that is on the desk of everyone involved in housing. In the document it says that, regarding development potential in active sites, there is a total of 49,212 permitted but uncommenced residential units, that is, permitted but have not been developed. Of those, 41,941 uncommenced units are on 270 inactive sites and 7,272 uncommenced units on 198 active sites. What does that tell us? It is not about the planning. These have got planning. We have heard so much about planning, yet somehow this is there. I am going to email this to everyone here today because we need to look at it. We have to ask, and the Minister and his officials have to ask, what is going on? We have thousands and thousands of sites that have permission but are being sat on. Who is making the money and capitalising? Local authorities have rezoned. The Planning Regulator may or may not have looked at some of these, but these are sites that are ready to go and technically should be built. You either use it or you lose it. In a housing crisis, those figures are a disgrace.
Turning to An Bord Pleanála, the Minister said that planning, rightly, was one of the critical components of this policy. We debated at great length in this House the Planning and Development Bill and the emergency aspect of getting it through. It was guillotined in both Houses of the Oireachtas. We still have not had the Bill translated into Gaeilge. If there was a legal challenge, that would be an absolute requirement because people are entitled to litigate as Gaeilge. I am aware that issue is being addressed by the Oireachtas, but resources will have to be put in place, because I am told it may be next year before the full translation of this Bill is ready. I ask the Minister to talk to people in his Department and in the Oireachtas to see how we can fully resource and assist those people to carry out that critical part of parliamentary work.
The Minister will be familiar with the, again disastrous, strategic housing development proposals. Until very recently, An Bord Pleanála had a section of its website on it and there were thousands and thousands of units there. I looked for it today and it was gone. I got one of my staff to check it out and was told it had been taken down, so I want the Minister to contact An Bord Pleanála tomorrow and ask it about this. Data and confidence are critical if we are to bring people on this journey and explain the problems. Let us not sweep them under the carpet or hide them. I am not suggesting the Minister is doing any of that, but An Bord Pleanála is under his remit and I am asking for that data to be put back up. I want to know how many units are waiting for approval within An Bord Pleanála under the now-defunct strategic housing development scheme. It is important. The Minister will recall that his colleagues in government billed this as a fast-track scheme, yet thousands and thousands of units still have not been developed under this fast track scheme. Eventually, people saw wisdom and abandoned the scheme. I ask the Minister to take that matter up with An Bord Pleanála.
An important document he has not referenced is the Report of The Housing Commission, an excellent body of work. We engaged and the State engaged and got this thing going. We need to have a critical look and tease it out. When the Oireachtas joint committees are established, the one on housing and local government needs to look at that. There is a significant volume of really positive work and if if the Government is not accepting all the commission’s recommendations, it is important for us to know why. The Government owes that to the people who engaged in the commission’s work.
I am a firm advocate of one-off rural housing. The Minister represents a rural constituency. He and his colleagues, be they councillors, Senators or TDs, know the demand for rural housing. It must, of course, be sustainable. I accept that. There must be tough conditions, though fair. I call on the Minister to honour a long-standing commitment of many Ministers to publishing draft new rural housing guidelines. I say "draft" because they should go out for a period of public consultation with all stakeholders and get feedback. Time and again, I meet councillors of all hues and parties who tell me about this and show me letters from the Minister’s Department with promises about guidelines being published. Nothing has been done in that regard for years, so will the Minister consider that important recommendation? I indicated to him before he came in that I had received correspondence from a councillor from his party, Councillor Audrey Buckley, about a number of concerns and I am very happy he going to take them up directly and do whatever he thinks is appropriate. I also indicated in advance of this that I had written to the Minister on behalf of Thomas Welby of Galway County Council about Circular 23/21, which was sent to chief executives, regarding the affordable housing fund scheme. The Minister might have a look at that in due course and respond as he considers appropriate.
It is important we align our housing provisions and economic development in the national planning framework, as the Minister said. We must look at establishing a housing delivery oversight executive because people want to know what is happening and to trust that the figures they are being told are the correct ones, properly validated by an independent body. That saves us from any suggested political manipulation of figures. People want confidence and I am asking the Minister to consider the establishment of a housing delivery oversight office.
I want further powers and resources for local authorities so they can be enabled and supported to deliver real and sustainable housing projects within their areas. I want in particular to ask the Minister to take urgent action to ensure the delivery of the greater Dublin drainage project for 2030. The lack of drainage is now a blockage to some development and the project must happen.
I accept that there are great difficulties and challenges. I do not doubt that people in this House from all parties and none are here to support the Minister. It is important that we stay focused and have real, validated and accurate data for every aspect of the challenges because that instills confidence in policymakers and city and county councillors. I wish the Minister well.
I remind Senators that if they name an individual, they must have approval to do so. The two people named by the Senator are councillors so I have no doubt that he has their permission.
I have given the relevant letter to the Minister.
That is no problem. I say that so everyone knows that if we name people, we need their approval to do so.
I congratulate the Minister on his appointment and thank him for coming to the Seanad to discuss the current housing situation. As the Fine Gael Seanad spokesperson for housing, I raise the issue of wastewater infrastructure across rural Ireland. I will use my own local electoral area of Gort-Kinvarra in south County Galway as the perfect example of a district where the building of houses is at a virtual standstill due to the lack of wastewater infrastructure. Within the district, there are 14 recognised towns and villages, of which only two, namely, Gort and Kinvarra, are serviced with wastewater treatment plants. The other 12 are effectively closed to development due to the lack of this critical infrastructure. Two years ago, as part of a pilot scheme, €21 million was made available by the State to Uisce Éireann for the provision of wastewater treatment facilities in two of the villages in the district, namely, Craughwell and Clarinbridge. To date, nothing has happened to progress these projects and these villages remain at a standstill.
In my neighbouring county of Clare, the villages of Broadford and Cooraclare were allocated funding through the same pilot scheme. Having spoken to my colleague, Deputy Cooney, I can tell the House that in that county, there are massive levels of frustration at the painstakingly slow pace of progress by Uisce Éireann in the development of that infrastructure.
There are a considerable number of towns and villages across rural Ireland that are currently serviced with municipal wastewater treatment plants that have reached capacity. The towns and villages that do not find themselves on the current capital plan are now closed to development. These include the key Galway town of Ballinasloe, where the wastewater treatment plant has now reached capacity, as well as Mountbellew, Glenamaddy, Ballygar and Gort. All of those towns are now closed to development due to the lack of capacity in existing plants. The same is true for Kilkishen in County Clare.
In advance of responsibilities being handed over to Irish Water in 2024, substantial work had been done by Galway County Council to develop plans for an east Galway main drainage scheme, which is now called the greater Galway drainage strategy. The scheme was intended to provide wastewater treatment for Athenry, Clarinbridge, Kilcolgan, Craughwell, Ardrahan, Laban and Ballinderreen. However, since 2014, these plans seem to have sat on a shelf somewhere in the offices of Irish Water. I urge the Minister to ensure those plans are progressed to site selection and planning stage as a matter of urgency.
To date, we have relied on once-off rural housing with stand-alone septic tanks or similar on-site wastewater treatment to house our people in rural Ireland. However, we all know that for numerous reasons, not least the preservation of our countryside, this housing model is not sustainable long term into the future. Therefore, I ask the Minister where our rural young people will live. In a rural parish such as my own, which has two small, unserviced villages, namely, Ardrahan and Laban, with a large rural hinterland dotted with old farmhouses and once-off rural houses that have been built over the past 25 years, a generation of young people are growing up faced with the reality that due to the lack of wastewater infrastructure in their home villages, they will be forced to leave their native place to find housing elsewhere.
While we have a housing crisis in rural Ireland, it is a housing crisis caused by an infrastructure crisis. We have the land to build on and the people to do the building, but our towns and villages, which either remain unserviced or the current plants have reached capacity, are closed for development. Local area plans are not put in place for unserviced villages and, due to environmental concerns, on-site packaged treatment plants are no longer acceptable to most local authorities for private housing developments. I urge the Minister to use all available resources to put in place wastewater treatment facilities in all Irish towns and villages as a matter of urgency.
The next thing I wish to discuss is student accommodation in college towns such as Galway, Limerick, Cork, Dublin, Maynooth, etc. Students are competing in the local housing rental market for accommodation, where as little as 5% in many cases are accommodated in on-campus or college-owned accommodation. Needless to say, this is putting massive pressure on the rental sectors in these places. Irish colleges and universities profit massively from the intake of fee-paying international students who also contribute to the pressure on the housing rental market. Approximately 40,400 international students were enrolled in higher education institutes in Ireland in 2024, with a further 128,400 international students enrolled in private English-language schools throughout Ireland. While this is a massive profit-making industry for these colleges, we cannot underestimate the pressure this is putting on the availability of housing in this State.
Let us look for a moment at the city of Rzeszów in Poland which, just like Dublin, markets itself internationally as a destination to study. That city is alive with students and they are the lifeblood of the city’s economy. Unlike here, however, just 1.2% of the students at the University of Rzeszów are accommodated in the private rental market. More than 98% are accommodated in purpose-built student accommodation, which is not only better for the students themselves but takes massive pressure off the private rental market. Before a college or a private institute of education in that city can make a course place available to an international student, they must first display to the relevant authorities that they have at their disposal purpose-built student accommodation to house that student. This is a model we are going to have to look at very seriously in this country.
The last thing I will touch on today is what I consider to have been a very shortsighted act which was carried out on a large number of local authority houses in recent years, that is, the blocking up of fully functional chimneys and solid-fuel fireplaces to achieve a particular BER rating. This act, which was in many cases carried out with no consultation with tenants, left thousands of homes with no source of heat in the absence of electricity. Thousands of local authority tenants around Ireland sat for days and weeks in the cold without heat after the storm. We took away the emergency backup plan. When it comes to heating your home, you always need an emergency backup plan. I call on the Minister to cease this regressive action and for the working chimneys and solid-fuel fireplaces to be reinstated in all local authority-owned homes that are not served with piped gas heating.
I thank Senator Murphy. The next speakers are from Sinn Féin. I believe Senator Maria McCormack is sharing time with Senator Andrews.
Is that agreed? Agreed.
As the Sinn Féin spokesperson for housing, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak to the Minister today. It is one of the most pressing issues for people, especially for families throughout the country and in my constituency of Laois. My constituents tell me they feel there has been a real lack of political will from the Government for far too long. It has been unable to find an effective solution and its Housing for All plan has failed.
Housing prices are rising, rents are rising and homelessness is rising. That is not just something we say; those are the facts. February's homeless figures show a record high of 15,378 people without a home, including 4,653 children. Asking prices for homes nationally rose again by an average of 3.7% during the first three months of 2025 according to the latest Daft.ie house price report. In Laois, prices in the first three months of this year were 14% higher than the previous year, meaning housing prices in Laois are rising much faster than anywhere else in the country. To buy a new home in Portlaoise now, buyers are paying an average of €500,000. The average rent on the open market nationally is €1,956, which is 43% higher than before 2020. The housing crisis needs an urgent and honest response from the Government but instead we see social and affordable housing targets missed time and time again, even though those targets were too low to begin with.
In the run-up to the general election, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael told barefaced lies about meeting housing targets, so it is hard to have confidence in the new Government plan which is threadbare of details and continues the pattern of low housing targets and no new policy ideas. According to the recent Sunday Independent Ireland Thinks poll, the public does not believe this Government is up to the challenge of housing. People do not believe this Government is even trying to solve the housing crisis. The people deserve better. Our young people deserve better. An entire generation of young people are locked out of affordable housing and many are choosing, or are forced, to emigrate.
It is not only young people who are struggling to put a roof over their heads. We are now seeing a growing number of people approaching pension age trapped in a private rental sector that does not meet their needs. With council lists growing, the overall reliance on the private rental sector for social housing and the failure to meet the social and affordable housing targets homelessness figures will continue to rise. However, there are solutions. Sinn Féin and other Opposition parties, as well as the Government's own Housing Commission, have set out detailed alternatives for the Minister to consider. We support the Housing Commission's call for higher targets of 60,000 new homes each year for the next five years. Of these, at least 15,000 a year should be social and 10,000 should be affordable. However, affordable needs to mean affordable in reality.
It is time to stand up for the renters. We need to freeze and reduce rents and introduce proper, secure tenancies. Sinn Féin will continue to hold the Government to account as we continue to offer alternative policies that are needed for people to one day have a home of their own. I really wish the Minister the very best of luck in his position and I hope we can finally end the housing crisis.
I wish the Minister the very best in his new position. It is important for everybody in the country that he is successful. I wish him the best. When it comes to housing, it is hard to know where to start. The list is extremely long. I will start with the regeneration of flat complexes in the city of Dublin. In my own constituency of Dublin Bay South, Pearse House is a large flat complex that was in the process of being regenerated. Stage 1 had been passed. They were looking for stage 2 planning but the Department has put a hold on that and said it is not going to go ahead. This, of course, is really devastating for residents. I was down there yesterday meeting with residents again. The regeneration is not just about Pearse House; it is about all the flat complexes throughout the inner city. The lack of maintenance within the flat complexes is equally shocking and slow. Within the last ten days to two weeks, I have been contacted by residents whose flats have been flooded with raw sewage coming up through the toilet and flooding the entire flats. The flats are then unlivable and they have to move their families to the homes of friends and neighbours. This is happening on an ongoing basis, however. Pearse House, like many of the Simms buildings, was built in the 1930s. They are very small flats.
They need to be regenerated. The Department is saying it needs additionality on the site. The reality is that it will not get additionality with buildings on a small footprint that are the size of Pearse House or any of the other flat complexes. We will not be able to create modern, livable homes for people at these locations if we are going to look to maintain the flats at the small size that they currently are. The Department needs to knock two flats into one in many cases in order to make them bigger and more livable. It is not going to be possible to get additionality with the 1930s Herbert Simms buildings. Flexibility needs to be built into the scheme. Verschoyle Court, which is not too far from there, it is a very large site with plenty of room. There is a very small number of homes in the senior citizens complex on that site. The Department could get additionality on a site adjacent to Pearse House flats. The work is already at a snail’s pace.
There is a need for regeneration at Oliver Bond flats, at Mercier House, at Beech Hill in Dublin 4 - people do not seem to recognise that there are issues in Dublin 4 as well - and at Rathmines Avenue in Dublin 6. The conditions in which people are living are horrendous and completely unacceptable. It would be worth the Minister’s while to visit flat complexes such as Pearse House or Glovers Court. As I have said previously, there are more drug dealers than residents in Glovers Court. Residents are waiting for regeneration but it is moving at a snail's pace. People are putting their lives on hold. One resident said to me that they are not living, they are surviving. All they are doing is surviving the conditions imposed on them by Dublin City Council and the Government. In fairness to the council, it is committed to the regeneration and is looking to come up with solutions but the Department is not flexible around this.
The standard of maintenance in the flat complexes is abysmal. There is raw sewage and there are rats running around the flats. The kids are having to step over them. I am not exaggerating when I say this. There are electrical faults. All the flats across the city of Dublin have to be regenerated. Unfortunately, this Government has neglected inner-city communities for so long. The people living in flat complexes like Ross Road, Nicholas Street and Bishop Street, and in our inner-city communities, have been forgotten and neglected for decades. There needs to be a step change in the urgency and investment into regeneration projects in the inner city. The paperwork and the processes need to be shortened so that each of the four phases of redevelopment and regeneration projects is much quicker.
Residents right across the city feel that before the election, the Government was telling people it was committed to the regeneration of flat complexes in the inner city and to supporting communities, but as soon as the election was over, the Pearse House regeneration project was dropped and residents have again been dropped from the plans to regenerate the flats on Pearse Street.
The Irish Glass Bottle site is a big site that will house between 7,000 and 10,000 people. The Luas was supposed to go there. The previous Government knocked it back in order that the Luas will not reach the Irish Glass Bottle site for another ten years. The site will be almost finished at that stage. Thousands of people will be living on that site. It is important that any homes there are affordable and are made available in the first phases of the development. There is concern that the affordable homes will not be in the first phases of the development of the Irish Glass Bottle site. This would make it increasingly difficult to deliver affordable homes at a later date.
I will make a final point. Anybody in Dublin seeking a meeting with a housing adviser in Dublin City Council has to wait seven or eight weeks. They could be homeless at that stage. It is completely unacceptable and needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
It sends a shiver down the spine of people who are saving for a mortgage when they hear of the constant increase in home prices in this country. People are saving money to stand still, while there is no corresponding increase in savings interest in banks. Rents are rising, the cost of living and food has increased and prices are going up and up. The housing crisis is a ticking time bomb. We cannot afford to have a whole generation of pensioners renting in the future. We already have poverty in old age for many. We have the highest levels of outward emigration since 2015. Of my four younger sisters, three have emigrated. We are losing teachers, gardaí, doctors, nurses and key workers, and the housing crisis is contributing to this. We have record levels of homelessness and vacancy and dereliction is rife. We need stronger penalties to tackle those who are leaving properties vacant.
Housing targets are not being met, despite what was said before the election. We need the State to step up to the mark urgently and scale up the ambition when it comes to delivering housing. We need a pandemic-style emergency response to the housing crisis. I do not have any faith in the Government when it comes to housing. I genuinely wish I did, but it was the last straw when I saw the Taoiseach laughing along with Trump in the White House recently regarding the housing crisis in Ireland. It showed utter contempt for people living in this country. I hope the Minister can prove me wrong. I sincerely hope he will get a handle on this brief and will make a huge impact in his role. I wish him well in his role.
I thank the Minister. The housing challenges are widespread. We have heard that we are living in a housing emergency. Over 15,000 people are homeless, including over 4,600 children. We have a massive challenge around short-term lets. Airbnbs are blocking people from accommodation. We had the disastrous decision to remove the tenant in situ scheme.
As the issue is so broad and given that I have so little time to speak, I will focus on an issue Senator Murphy spoke about, namely, Uisce Éireann and wastewater supply and infrastructure, which is hindering new housing developments nationally, and the impact that has on rural communities specifically. Uisce Éireann is not explicitly under the remit of the Minister's Department, but at some stage the Department has to take responsibility for the delays in developments we are seeing. It is having a serious impact on rural Ireland. Significant delays in updating water infrastructure have led to huge roadblocks for communities. Vital housing projects cannot move forward.
The very small village of Bennettsbridge in Kilkenny has been told it will not have any wastewater treatment until after 2029, and until that is done no other village in Kilkenny will have wastewater treatment updates. Huge numbers of people on the social housing list have nowhere to go. This includes Paulstown, Piltown and Inistioge. They have been told the infrastructure will not be in place until 2029 at the earliest.
This issue is not unique to Kilkenny. Rural communities across Ireland are facing endless delays. Developers are ready to build. Families are desperate for homes. Yet, we have a complete failure to deliver wastewater connections. Progress is at a standstill and it is not a new issue. We have seen this coming. Every year that passes means lost opportunities for housing and rural community development, which is important. In Ireland, rural communities feel a greater sense of exclusion. This is compounding and adding to that feeling. We cannot allow bureaucratic delays and underfunding to contribute further to that.
This has gone on long enough. I call for immediate action. I suspect the Minister's response is that Uisce Éireann is not within his remit, but at this stage that answer is not good enough. We need a holistic approach. We need the Department to take action on quasi-governmental organisations like Uisce Éireann.
I welcome the Minister and wish him all the best in what is no doubt the most difficult portfolio in government. Having served as a Minister of State in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, I saw and was part of the immense effort by the previous Government to try to address this problem. It is an intergenerational problem, as other Senators have said.
I will focus on two things: vacancy and dereliction; and Uisce Éireann. Senator P. J. Murphy raised this as well. According to census 2022, there were 163,433 vacant properties, excluding holiday homes, on census night in that year. Approximately 30% of the vacant properties numerated in 2022 were also vacant in 2016. Nearly half of them - 23,000 - were also vacant on census night in 2011 so there is a pervasive vacancy problem. During the term of the last Government, we attempted to address the issue through the croí cónaithe grants and the vacancy grants. These efforts need to be ramped up significantly. We need to look at the potential of tens of thousands of pre-1919 houses, dwellings and above-shop premises - this is a UNESCO definition - in rural towns and villages and in larger cities across the country. Here in Dublin, there are above-shop premises and Georgian townhouses which are completely unoccupied. I see it in my home city of Kilkenny. I spoke to a surveyor last week who said that the vast majority of above-shop premises are empty. There is huge potential here.
One thing we looked at from the heritage side was putting in place conservation advice - the €5,000 grant - and having architectural conservation officers in every local authority which is really important. We need to see this not as a heritage issue but as a housing solution. It keeps our towns compact and vibrant, prevents urban sprawl and leads to the activation of professional conservation services across the country. It is heritage-led regeneration in action. We need to put it front and centre of our housing challenges.
On the Uisce Éireann issue, I listened to what Jerry Grant had to say on the desperate state of our water and waste water infrastructure. We need to significantly ramp up investment in water and waste water. We have heard about the challenges in rural Ireland. I do not think the crazy Shannon pipeline project will see the light of day for ten years, in reality, if we look at the planning system. As well as reconsidering the project, we should look at Dublin supply and conservation measures and at ways of reducing demand. That, on top of much more stringent targets and parameters for waste water treatment under the recast waste water treatment directive, will present us with even further challenges as treatment plants are being commenced or commissioned now and in light of what will be demanded at European level in the next couple of years. I do not envy the Minister’s task but everyone here is united in trying together to finding solutions. This is an immense challenge.
The Minister is very welcome. I echo what Senators Noonan and Andrews have said. This is not an easy task and we all need the Minister to succeed in his role. The release of the latest record homelessness figures showed that there are 158 adults in Sligo, Leitrim and Donegal in emergency accommodation along with 16 families, including 43 children. We have outlined all the problems here and it is clear that the Government’s approach is not working. Surely it is madness for us to continue to pursue a policy direction that is taking us from a housing crisis to a condition of permanent and chronic disaster. The need for social housing is phenomenal. More people are entitled to and seeking social housing than ever. Only this morning, Ocean FM reported on a report from Donegal County Council which identified the need for 430 more social homes in south Donegal alone.
A 2023 summary of housing assessments published by the Housing Agency clearly tells us that more people are entitled to social housing. It said that about 40% of people on the housing list are in private rented accommodation and are in receipt of support payments such as HAP. As minimum standards apply to all private rentals, people living in private rentals theoretically receive the protection of the Residential Tenancies Board when it comes to the standard of their housing. However, not all of these standards apply to social homes supplied by approved housing bodies or local authorities, and they should. As Senator Andrews said, people in social housing do not deserve to be treated like second-class citizens. I was contacted last week by a tenant of a local authority home in Sligo. She is a proud person who does not like to complain or ask for help but the situation had become so bad that she felt she had no option but to reach out. Her home is draughty with old timber-framed windows. Having shrunk, the wooden door no longer fits snugly to its frame and there are gaps with the wild Atlantic wind blowing straight in everywhere. This lady’s home is impossible to heat no matter how much money she throws into it. If this were a private tenancy, the landlord would quite rightly be issued with an enforcement notice by Sligo County Council and the landlord would be given nine weeks to bring the property up to an acceptable standard, but because it is a council tenancy there is no such recourse.
I know this from being a councillor myself. I contacted Sligo County Council to see what could be done. While the staff were understanding of the tenant's situation and empathetic to her needs, they are hampered by two things, the lack of staff directly employed by Sligo County Council and the lack of funds to carry out the necessary remedial works. I know from having been a councillor that the lack of people directly employed to look at small maintenance works means these are often ignored until big grant schemes come into play and then the situation continually gets worse. None of us, in our own homes, would do that and let a problem get worse and worse. There is also a severe lack of funding for housing improvements because the money that comes in from tenancies is often used up and is often the only money they get. I urge the Minister to look at properly resourcing all the local authorities, at least to take care of the stock we have so that people can live in their homes in a comfortable and heated way.
I thank the Minister for coming in today. He has an unenviable task, but he is meeting it with a head-on challenge and we appreciate that. I will keep it brief as there is quite a bit of repetition today. We all know the issues. We are in the thick of a housing crisis, the likes of which we have not faced before. With the population growing at a phenomenal rate, the demand is constantly outstripping supply. As has been said, Fianna Fáil in government is absolutely committed to building more homes and ensuring that great needs within our society and economy are met. In this regard, Housing for All sets out a comprehensive, multi-annual programme to accelerate and significantly increase the delivery of new homes, which the Minister outlined.
Where I live, south County Louth, is experiencing what can only be described as a building boom, with housing units being completed at a rapid rate, filling the need for homes from the growing population. One of the developers responsible for many of the houses and apartments being built, especially along the new port access route, is Castlethorn, yet its managing director recently went on record explaining how it wants to build 20,000 new homes but the Irish infrastructure is not robust enough. This is not an advertising section for Castlethorn, but it has been tasked with ramping up output to deliver 20,000 homes over the next ten years. As I said, it has several hundred homes started on a site on Drogheda, with capacity for up to 1,400 units. It is also active in Shankill, building 312 units, with a further 370 planned. Last year, it almost completed 370 homes in Kellystown in Clonsilla, Dublin, which has potential for a further 400 homes.
Speaking to the reporter Killian Woods from the Business Post, Castlethorn's MD, Ronan Columb, said water and electricity are the biggest issues for them and the entire industry. On all the developer's sites, there is either an electricity problem or a water problem. He singled out the east coast, saying the infrastructure on the eastern seaboard "isn't robust enough to take additional units". This is slowing down building. The article mentioned the site in Drogheda where the 1,400 units are planned. Even though several hundred of those units are complete, the developer knows it will come to a point, for example with Irish Water, where there is a capacity constraint. Eventually, it will have to stop building to wait for Irish Water to deliver on infrastructure.
I know this is not unique to Louth and the east coast and that hundreds of private, local authority and one-off developments all over the country are suffering due to a lack of infrastructure. It is critical that we continue to invest additional capital in Uisce Éireann to support reaching our new housing targets. We must prioritise water and wastewater infrastructure to deliver the capacity to facilitate housing development in all our towns and villages.
Once again referring to the massive development taking place in north Drogheda, it is mainly springing up close to the port access northern cross route. The first phase was completed last year and the second will hopefully begin soon. National funding for the third phase, though, is crucial. It needs to be secured as soon as possible in order for this vital road to be completed. This will unlock land for the necessary houses to be built because right now there is no access to that land. I realise this is all very cart-before-the-horse stuff, but our housebuilding will grind to a halt otherwise. There is also a need for more affordable houses in these developments given that an entire layer of our younger workers is being priced out of housing. One of the developments I referred to earlier is Ballymakenny Park in north Drogheda, where there were just ten affordable housing units out of 97 available homes.
I agree with my colleague Senator Noonan, who mentioned vacancy and dereliction. We have a huge amount of that in Drogheda and all across north Louth. There is no impetus I can see for local authorities to bring back into usage many of the vacant properties they have. We need to really push the vacancy and dereliction grants to get vast areas that are quite empty back into use rather than using new housing.
Let us get our ducks in a row and get the utility services up to par so we can deliver the homes we need for now and into the future.
The Minister is very welcome to the House. I welcome the opportunity to discuss with him the housing crisis that is plaguing every constituency in the country.
I will give an anecdotal example from my home town of Ballina, County Mayo. I have spent the past six years as a local councillor in Mayo County Council, working with colleagues across the county to improve housing supply. At every opportunity, we have tried to zone land, empower developers and build homes in our towns, villages and constituencies. At county development plan level, we are told to wait for a local area plan. I sat on the Northern and Western Regional Assembly and, again, at assembly level, we were told to wait for the local area plan. The assembly identified that Mayo was only meeting 30% of its housing output target. It was a drastically lower number than it had set its sights on.
At local area plan level, we had the full agreement of all six councillors in the Ballina municipal district on land zoning. We had agreement among planners and the plan went forward to the Minister and the Office of the Planning Regulator. This was only a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, all recommendations that were brought forward on this local area plan were rejected and refused, and the original proposal remained. On a local area plan level, councillors are trying their best to deliver, unlock and empower landowners who are ready to break ground.
Two parcels of land were zoned residential but have now been dezoned. One has a live planning application for 90 houses, which will now be refused by An Bord Pleanála because the land has unfortunately been dezoned. It is a bizarre scenario, considering the lands that were dezoned were within walking distance of schools and shops, and more central than other housing estate developments.
Can the Minister send a ministerial directive order to zone residential lands where there is capacity with wastewater treatment, the infrastructure in relation to lighting, footpaths and broadband, and the full political will at a local level? Can he send a mistrial directive regarding land that was already zoned residential, with the full support of the local area plan and the county development plan? Is it possible and within his gift to reconsider rezoning this land residential so we can begin to meet the existing needs and demands? That is only one element of a much broader challenge that the Minister has. As has been mentioned, we all want the Minister to succeed and we all want to work together on this.
It is a real pinch point and sore point for my constituency when we have, in one town alone, more than 500 people on the social housing list and almost 800 people who have identified a desire for affordable homes. Yet, in Mayo, only five affordable houses were delivered in Westport as part of a 50-house social housing project.
There are big challenges but there are also big opportunities. I welcome the proposal on modular developments in back gardens, if that is brought through and legislated for. It is not a one-size-fits-all scenario, but we need to empower families, homeowners and property owners who want to be part of the solution, and give people autonomy and independence. We have a brilliant modular home developer in County Mayo, namely, Big Red Barn, which creates fabulous, affordable A-rated homes and can help unlock that in back gardens.
I would like for us to empower local authorities, whether it is empowering the councillors on zoning; empowering the councillors to use compulsory purchase order on people who are sitting on brownfield and derelict sites, speculating as the crisis further deepens; or empowering councillors as regards making compulsory sale orders so that local authorities can buy houses from property owners who have derelict or disused vacant properties and immediately get them back on the market.
I wish the Minister well. I wish him, the State and all of us success in addressing this existential crisis, as he described it. In particular on these zoning matters, will he send a ministerial directive so that lands that were previously zoned residential but were dezoned could be rezoned as residential? This will mean that projects like the ones I identified will not get refused when they go to the board because the rug has been pulled from under them.
My final point relates to local transport plans. Local authorities have identified safe and sustainable routes of travel from the town centre to the periphery. If we have identified sustainable development in regard to walking and cycling infrastructure to the periphery of settlements in towns and villages right across the country, we could include automatic zoning from the periphery to the town centre for residential development.
I thank the Minister for being here. Homelessness is very close to my heart. I have been involved in the homelessness sector since 2006, so I have seen it grow into a humanitarian crisis that demands immediate attention. Many people have quoted the recent figures from the Department of housing that show that more than 15,378 individuals are in emergency accommodation, including 4,653 children. These are not just numbers; they represent lives that are totally disrupted. We have children growing up in hotel rooms, families without shelter and individuals forced onto the streets, as we see every day at our Lighthouse cafe in Pearse Street.
When we break down the statistics, we see that in the past month alone, 92 adults, 50 children and 21 families were made homeless. These are serious numbers. It means that approximately 2,200 families are in emergency accommodation, which is often unsuitable and unstable. The figures are unacceptable but they are also preventable. I spoke in these Houses in 2016. We were told that homelessness would be eradicated by 2020. Today, when we get the numbers, they are treated as a tragic update on a crisis that continues to spiral out of control. Catherine Kenny, CEO of the Dublin Simon Community, said it is a national embarrassment. It certainly is that, but we need decisive action now on the root causes, of which there are several.
Some of my colleagues mentioned certain failures regarding social and affordable housing. There has been a repeated failure to meet the housing targets, which leaves thousands of families in emergency accommodation for extended periods. There is an urgent need to allocate more social housing to long-term homeless families. That strategy proved very effective during the pandemic.
We have talked about protections for tenants. Recently, we heard Dublin City Council is going to get €22 million less for the tenant in situ scheme. That is also going to exacerbate homelessness. Focus Ireland has gone on record as saying that it will place thousands more at risk of eviction. The message is clear: we need to safeguard the most vulnerable, and the current policies are not doing that.
Homelessness extends beyond just providing shelter. It has a profound social ramification on the individuals experiencing homelessness. Children in emergency accommodation struggle academically. They lack space to play or study, while families often experience health challenges, including anxiety or depression. My work with Tiglin has also found that people experiencing homelessness are more susceptible to addiction, long-term unemployment and health complications. Imagine a child growing up in a hotel without a place to study or to be able to invite friends to stay. That is the harsh reality for 4,653 children in Ireland.
There are major steps we can take. We cannot see homelessness as inevitable. Viable solutions exist and they must be implemented without delay, such as increasing the housing allocation and committing to social housing for people on the long-term homeless list. We must also try to do our best to restore tenant protections, reverse any detrimental changes that will come about through the tenant in situ scheme and strengthen the no-fault eviction safeguard. As I have said in this House a few times, we must also recognise homelessness as a crisis, not just in words but also in actions.
With all the money we have Ireland stands as one of the wealthiest countries in Europe and to have 15,378 people homeless is not acceptable. We must demand immediate, effective action to address homelessness with the seriousness it deserves. Ten years from now, we will be able to look back at the fact that we solved the crisis and came together under Deputy Browne's Ministry. I have heard the different soundings he has made and am encouraged by them, so I look forward to seeing what he does on the ground.
The Minister is welcome. I thank him for his time in the Chamber to discuss this critical issue. I also thank him for the time he gave last week in Limerick during his visit with the Taoiseach. The extensive, in-depth and candid interview he gave to our local radio station, Live 95 FM, was excellent and is available as a podcast. I also thank him for the time he spent with local councillors to discuss specific issues they raised and for the more than two hours he and the Taoiseach gave to focusing on all matters in Limerick with the new directly elected Mayor, John Moran, at the first Limerick mayoral and Government consultative forum.
During those engagements, the Mayor raised and outlined his innovative plans for meanwhile-use of State-owned lands that are due to be developed at Colbert Quarter in Limerick and highlighted the opportunity to bring forward modular homes for people in advance of the phased development of permanent homes on the same site. I thank him for his engagement on those innovative proposals. I know he is open to receiving all types of new ideas that may help in tackling our housing challenge. I look forward to the Mayor and his team following up with the Minister with more detail on how we may take that project forward.
I also acknowledge the €15 million the Minister announced this week for second-hand homes to be purchased in Limerick. The acquisition of those second-hand social homes, including under the tenant in situ scheme, is crucial. It has been very successful in Limerick and it has allowed us to stem the tide of families being made homeless through engagement with their landlords to purchase the homes, allowing them to continue their residency as council tenants. I thank the Minister for the €15 million of funding going into that in 2025 alone.
It is only a combination of these multiple different strategies to activate housing that will see us emerge from this crisis. I commend and acknowledge the significant efforts being made by the Minister's Department, our local authorities and private sector stakeholders to get homes delivered. I welcome the comments on driving and incentivising private investment he made at the beginning of this debate. It is crucial to raising the level of delivery and achieving the numbers we need that private investors come into the market across the country, not just in Dublin and parts of Cork as we have seen to date. The State alone will not be able to fund or build all the homes we need in Limerick. It is estimated we need more than 2,500 new homes to be built per annum in Limerick. While the numbers are going in the right direction - in 2022 circa 800 new homes were built in Limerick, circa 800 new homes were built in 2023 and in 2024 the number rose to 1,000 new homes being built - the numbers fall short of the 2,500 new homes we require. I thank the Minister for his focus on that with the different stakeholders in Limerick.
We estimate that approximately 20,000 adults are living at home with their parents in Limerick city and county and there are approximately 500 individuals living in emergency accommodation in Limerick. This is a pressing issue for us. It is crucial, therefore, that where the State owns land and has responsibility for the delivery of those homes, those projects are fast-tracked and delivered as quickly as possible.
I ask the Minister to make inquiries, as I have done, on the status of a very important project for new home delivery in Limerick, that is, the partnership between the Land Development Agency and Limerick City and County Council to deliver 181 homes in Mungret for affordable purchase. This very welcome and much-needed project is particularly significant because planning has already been granted for the development. In fact, planning has been granted for a total of 253 homes on the site but we have yet to hear what progress has been made on the project since the tender documents were issued last June. A construction company has not been appointed. I ask the Minister to make inquiries and get an update on that crucial project in Raheen.
I welcome the Minister to the Seanad. We are pleased to have the opportunity to talk to him about some of the most pressing issues in our communities and throughout the country.
I join my colleagues in wishing the Minister well with the arduous task ahead of him. He has hit the ground running and I have no doubt he will continue to work 24-7 on this difficult area with ingenuity and with many stakeholders. Housing cannot be siloed within the Department of housing. Working with local authorities, Irish Water and many different agencies, we can and must deliver more houses and sustainable communities.
Houses are being built - I see this day after day because a lot of building is going on in Kildare - but the infrastructure we need is not keeping pace. For example, a second bridge is needed in Newbridge because so many people traverse the town centre using its only bridge. We have housing developments on four sides of Newbridge now. We need to have this second bridge. I understand Kildare County Council recently provided €150,000 to help make a business case for it but it is only one part of the outer orbital route. It is crucial that we have that route and a new secondary school, because the secondary schools are full. Young people have to be bused out of Newbridge to go to school. We are to have a new secondary school on the edge of Kildare town, which will solve the problem over the next few years for the Curragh, Kildare town and the Newbridge area, but Newbridge absolutely needs to have that.
Lands have been consistently dezoned in Kildare, including in Newbridge, Rathangan, Kilcullen and Athy. I hope that, through the Minister's good offices, we will see that change. I cannot for the life of me understand it. Even in my time as a councillor, which is well over ten years ago, I thought it was completely wrong when land was being dezoned. It pushed up the price of housing because the available zoned land achieved premium prices. I hope that will be looked at.
Right-sizing is an area that needs more focus. There are many people living in houses that are not suitable for their needs. They may be out of town, in large four- or five-bedroom houses. As their children have fled the nest, they want to be in a situation as they get older to be able to live close to the centre of town, in smaller housing units. This would make those other houses available to growing families, for whom they would be more appropriate. There needs to be more incentives from Government to do this. A gentleman named Pat O'Mahony has written an excellent book on this issue. It details his experience of living in Australia, in particular, where many over the age of 60 - which is very young - decide to downsize and still work. They are right-sizing in communities where there are more services and they are looking at down the line when they are older.
I want to raise the issue of the Land Registry. I have been dealing with a situation where, sadly, somebody passed away. The person had eight properties. The executor of the will wished to be able to help in solving the housing problem. It took two to three years to get those over the line. When Kildare County Council purchased the houses, it took about 18 months to get the changeover in the Land Registry to allow Kildare County Council do the necessary works. We had houses that were becoming derelict and would have been available to help people on the housing list. Sadly, the delays with Tailte Éireann were very regrettable.
Another area we need to put a huge focus on is affordable housing. It was fantastic to see so much money - €486 million - being committed last week to social housing. I want to see the same investment in affordable housing around the country.
Caithfidh mé iarraidh ar Seanadóir Tully mo leithscéal a ghabháil. I should have brought you in as the last speaker. My apologies.
No problem. I thank the Acting Chair. I want to focus initially on low-income earners because they frequently fall between two stools, as it is. I will give an example of what I mean by this. Recently I was contacted by a constituent. She, her husband and their four children have been living in a rental property for the past 11 to 12 years and paying a reasonable rent. Now, however, the landlord requires the house for his son, who is returning from abroad. The family completely understands the situation. However, they cannot find anywhere to rent in the region for a reasonable sum. They applied for social housing but were deemed not to qualify because their earnings were €43,500 per year. The threshold is only €31,500. The family's income includes the working family payment. They applied for a local authority loan but, because they already had a car loan and another loan, they were deemed to not qualify. If they had paid off those loans, the council said they might qualify for a loan of €132,000 to buy a house. It would be difficult to find a house for a family of this size for that sum. The interesting thing about this is that the working family payment was not taken into account as income in this situation. It is not fair to hold it against the family, as it were, for social housing. It is seen as income when people apply for social housing but not when they apply for a local authority loan. Could this be looked at to see if it could be changed?
As for the affordable housing scheme, I was told that, in general, a person has to be earning more than €50,000 and up to €55,000 to qualify for it. For people earning anything from the low €30,000s to the low €50,000s, there is no support. They do not qualify for social housing or any of the supports that go with it but they also do not qualify for a home loan or for the affordable housing scheme, where it exists.
The vacant property grant is very welcome, although the 13 month turnaround time is harsh on people who cannot find workers to do the work. I have come across a couple of examples of people who have bought homes which were vacant and qualified for the vacant property grant. However, in both cases, because they faced homelessness and did not have family nearby who they could stay with while they applied for the grant and moved into the home, were then deemed not to qualify for the vacant property grant. That is unfair. In each case, the property was vacant for two years or more and qualified for the scheme when they bought it. They moved in because they had nowhere else to go. Even though the houses needed a lot of work, they were liveable. They applied for the grant and were told they did not qualify.
Again they were left high and dry. There was one couple with a family who were being evicted from a house in Galway. They bought a house in Cavan, had no family support around them and moved in because they had nowhere else to go. They could not afford to pay for a bed and breakfast to live in while they applied for the grant. Another person, due to marriage breakdown, bought a cheap house. The person, who also had a number of health challenges, was told he or she did not qualify for the grant any more as he or she had moved in and the house was no longer vacant. Could that be looked at? It is really unfair.
A number of people have mentioned the high level of vacancy. It is in every city, town and village throughout the country. I was contacted by someone who is on the housing list. She lives in the village of Bellananagh in Cavan, which is close to me. She sent me pictures of 22 houses that were vacant. They are not derelict but vacant. I know the resources are not there in the local authority to follow up and see who these houses belong to and if they could be sold or rented out. There needs to be some way to force people into doing something with a property if they own it and it is sitting idle when we have so many homeless people at the moment with nowhere to live, who would be willing and delighted to take on one of these houses and do it up and move in. Bellananagh is not an outlier; it is the same in every other town, village and city.
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.
Tá mórfháilte roimh an Aire. It is very gratifying for us in the south east to see somebody from there at the Cabinet table. I hope the Minister will look after the south east to the best of his ability. It is lovely to see a champion of the purple and gold in the Cabinet milieu. I worked a lot in County Wexford in the past 20 years, but I only found out the meaning of the purple and gold during a visit to a primary school in Oulart. I was talking to the principal there and he asked me if I knew the origin of the purple and gold colours. I had to confess to him that I did not. He informed and educated me by telling me the purple and gold colours stand for the beautiful sand and heather in County Wexford, which I think is very appropriate.
As they say down in the Gaeltacht, sin mo dhóthain den sobal bog, that is enough of the soft soap; now down to the real business. I have four points to put before the Minister. The first concerns the fact that most of the Senators have spoken about the quantity of houses. I just wish to make a small reference to the quality of houses. As the Minister will know, approximately 12,000 registered plumbers are operating in the State. The Minister and I know, however, that probably four times that number of people are working and doing plumbing and central heating jobs who have no qualifications or ratification. A strong argument is to be made to bring all those people operating in that way into the fiscal economy and regulation under the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU. Gas, electricity and water are all looked after under the utilities. For some strange reason, though, when it comes to plumbing anybody can go into a house, look after the building of it, call themselves a plumber and undertake work on the pipes and central heating system. Often, this is with disastrous consequences, with the spillage of oil and a subsequent need to reclaim ground. Households are being put through awful angst as a result. This might be something that the Minister could possibly examine under his remit.
My next point concerns the age-old problem we have of people trying to get planning permission. I know this is not the responsibility of the Minister, but I ask him to be cognisant in the context of the local authorities that so many people in rural Ireland are in an aged cohort. Their children want to build on land beside them. It makes social and economic sense that they be facilitated in any way possible. When the Minister is talking to the directors of services and planning and to chief executives in local authorities, I ask if he can do anything to bring about a more kindly look at the difficulties people have in supporting their parents in their old age by being physically close by in a house which may be on the family's land. To me, it makes absolute sense.
The third thing is that out of bizarre good fortune, last year, I was elected mayor of Waterford City and County Council. I know the Minister has an intellectual and academic connection with Waterford, so this will be of interest to him. I also, coincidentally, was a member of the Údarás na Gaeltachta board. I was able to facilitate a connection between the chief executive of the county and city council and the Údarás chief executive with regard to two patches of land in the Waterford Gaeltacht. There was great synergy between the two groups and they wanted to build on those two sections of land, but for some reason I get the palpable sense that everything has stalled. However, I do think that a letter from the Minister's capable hand to both the Údarás and the chief executive in Waterford City and County Council might just concentrate minds. I beg the Minister to do that, check into it and see whether he can move that project along because so many people are crying out for housing in the Gaeltachts, and Waterford Gaeltacht is no exception.
I thank the Minister for his time.
Before the next speaker, cuirim fáilte roimh na daltaí agus múinteoirí ó Choláiste Muire Tuar Mhic Éadaigh i gContae Mhaigh Eo atá in éineacht leis an Aire Stáit, an Teachta Alan Dillon. I welcome the students and teachers from Tourmakeady in the Gaeltacht region in County Mayo. I will go to Senator Blaney. He can blind them with Gaeilge.
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.
I welcome the Minister and thank him for coming to the Chamber to hear what we have to say. Homelessness is at an all-time high. As of March, it was 11% higher than it was in the same month last year. There are 15,378 people living in emergency accommodation and that number includes 4,653 children. This is equivalent to 155 full classrooms of children living in uncertainty and stress, without permanent housing.
These numbers are stark enough, but what is often lost in this shocking legacy of homelessness is the hidden homelessness, the people who are not recorded in the statistics but who are staying on friends’ couches, sleeping in their cars or, as in cases in Cavan and Monaghan, tucked away behind ditches in mobile homes. Cavan and Monaghan are littered with mobile homes behind every ditch you pass on the road. People have been locked out of the housing market and, in an attempt to put a roof over their heads, they have invested in mobile homes and caravans. The issue is these families are living in constant fear of being served enforcement notices by local authorities as they may not have planning permission for their mobile homes. The recent move to ease the planning laws for cabins and modular homes in back gardens is a welcome development but I would like to see the relaxation extended to mobile homes, even temporarily, while we are in this crisis.
I have worked closely with a family in County Cavan who are petrified they will be evicted from the mobile home they live in behind their parents’ home. After being approved for a mortgage, the wife became pregnant and, because she was seen as a dependant, the mortgage was withdrawn from them. They used the money they had saved as a deposit to buy a mobile home, but they never realised the mobile home needed planning permission as it was on wheels. The current rules around cabins and modular units are bizarre and ludicrous. The fact that modular units of 40 sq. m attached to existing structures do not need planning approval but stand-alone units do makes little sense to me. Eoin and Maria McGovern have two little babies. They work hard. All they did was try to fend for themselves. Can the enforcement order served on them now be lifted? They have gone through enough.
The Government could, theoretically, build an accommodation centre for asylum seekers in the field next to this family, for hundreds of people to live in, without a single sentence appearing on An Bord Pleanála's website. Yet this young couple and their two babies have been threatened. An enforcement notice has, harshly, been served on them for parking a mobile home in their back garden where it is not even visible from the road. Why is the Government hell-bent on punishing citizens who work hard? Why are they being treated so harshly? Prior to Storm Éowyn, I rang the couple to see what provision they had made, given that a red warning had been put in place. A local hotel in Cavan town had already been in touch before me to offer them a night's accommodation.
While I welcome the proposed planning changes, it must be extended to mobile homes. We also need a commitment from the Government that those currently under pressure and under threat of eviction will have a stay put on their eviction until the change is made. There are people who can build their own houses, but what is stopping them is the bureaucracy and the prohibitive cost of connections to the ESB, water and wastewater. Investment in serviced sites for young people must be seriously considered.
Cuirim fáilte roimh na daltaí ó Choláiste Mhuire, Rathmines. I welcome the pupils from Coláiste Mhuire, Rathmines. I hope they have an enjoyable visit.
I thank my fellow scalder, Senator Cathal Byrne, for his kind comments. I know his family are very proud of him as well for being here in the Seanad.
I thank all Senators for their contributions this afternoon. As with the recent debates in the Dáil, today's engagement will help to reform our approach to the challenges we face. Before drawing this afternoon's debate to an end, I reaffirm our commitment to tackling the many challenges in the housing sector. Housing has become a serious social challenge that is having an outsized impact on people's lives. We must act with unprecedented urgency to meet the challenge and ensure that all of us in the State have safe, secure and affordable homes.
We do not underestimate the scale of the challenge. We are putting the work in, day in and day out. We are making progress. The Government has provided the first affordable homes in a generation. From a standing start when Housing for All was published in 2021, we have delivered more than 10,000 affordable housing supports, with delivery in 2024 likely to significantly exceed the 2023 outturn. Our ambition is to deliver much more. The programme for Government commits to support the delivery of 15,000 starter homes, on average, each year during its lifetime. We will do this by redoubling our efforts and continuing our close working partnership with local authorities and other delivery partners.
The social housing programme has resulted in the greatest number of social homes delivered for many decades. We will continue to build on this. Supporting households experiencing homelessness remains our priority. I reaffirm Ireland's commitment to working to eradicate homelessness by 2030. Budget 2025 allocates more than €300 million to this end, up €61 million on the 2024 allocation. In addition, €12 million in capital funding is being provided for supported emergency accommodation for families and individuals experiencing homelessness. We have also committed to creating 2,000 Housing First tenancies to target long-term homelessness. Earlier this week my Department wrote to all local authorities to confirm its continued support for a targeted second-hand social housing acquisitions programme for 2025. This will allow us to continue responding to acute local situations. The allocation of €325 million this year will support a significant programme of acquisitions for identified priority categories of need. I specifically asked local authorities to focus support on the most vulnerable households, including tenant in situ acquisitions, older persons and persons with disabilities, those exiting homeless services and buy-and-renew acquisitions that tackle vacancy. Prioritising vulnerable households for support is important, but it does not mean excluding others. It will be a matter for local authorities to determine how they can best respond to local needs and priorities.
Delivering 60,000 new homes by 2030, supporting 15,000 starter homes per year and delivering an average of 12,000 social homes presents combined and individual challenges. While these targets reflect a considerable level of ambition, I believe they are credible. I am confident the step-change in delivery since 2022 provides a robust platform on which the supply of new homes can be substantially increased over the next six years and thereafter. To this end, we will work to grow capacity in the residential construction sector. We will continue to invest in modern methods of construction, having accelerated the pace of construction and enhanced efficiencies, and increasing the construction sector's capacity to support the uplift in housing targets by the end of the decade.
I am acutely aware of the frustrations experienced with the planning system. I am confident that reforms being introduced through the new Planning and Development Act will alleviate many of the frustrations and bring the certainty and confidence needed to plan for and deliver the scale of housing we need.
There are also increased resources for An Bord Pleanála, which have already yielded significant improvements in its performance, since the Government invested a doubling of resources in that organisation. State investment, which is critical to crowding in much-needed private investment, will continue to grow in the coming years. We have no choice in that regard if we are to deliver at least 300,000 new homes by the end of the decade. Budget 2025 provides for record investment in housing, with €6.8 billion in capital funding now available, and a further €1.65 billion in current funding also being provided to address housing needs. However, it remains the case that delivering an average of 50,000 homes per year to 2030 will require an estimated €20 billion of development finance each year. Despite historic levels of State investment, the simple fact is that a large proportion of private capital must come from international sources. Without it, we risk exacerbating our supply and affordability challenges, in particular in the private rental sector.
A review of rent pressure zones, RPZs, will also be critical in this regard. The review is considering if RPZs should continue as is or be removed, modified or replaced, as well as looking at potential future policy options and how they might be implemented. I hope to bring proposals to the Government on foot of the review in the near future. I reaffirm my commitment to ensuring that whatever changes are made, our priority focus will continue to be on protecting renters and securing affordability in the private rental sector.
Once again, I thank all the Senators who contributed this afternoon. I will not shy away from the challenges ahead. I am committed to considering all means at my disposal to address the challenges, building on the robust platform and increased supply under Housing for All, and striving to deliver more than 300,000 new homes by 2030.
Cuireadh an Seanad ar fionraí ar 5 p.m. agus cuireadh tús leis arís ar 5.32 p.m.
Sitting suspended at 5 p.m. and resumed at 5.32 p.m.