Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I am introducing the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2024 which intends to make amendments to the Housing (Regulation of Approved Housing Bodies) Act 2019 and the Affordable Housing Act 2021.

The Housing (Regulation of Approved Housing Bodies) Act 2019 provides for the regulation of approved housing bodies, AHBs, for the purpose of supporting stronger governance and the financial viability of that sector.

I do know whether there are copies of my speech for Members.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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It is okay.

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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Is the Deputy sure? I thought there might have been copies for Members but the speech was amended. The Deputy is okay. We will arrange for copies.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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I would like a copy as well.

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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A slight amendment was made to the speech just beforehand.

The Housing (Regulation of Approved Housing Bodies) Act 2019 provides for the regulation of AHBs, for the purpose of supporting stronger governance and the financial viability of that sector.

Section 25 of the 2019 Act provides for existing AHBs, approved under section 6 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1992 to be deemed registered on 1 January 2022, subject to applying for registration within 12 months for AHBs providing or managing 300 or more dwellings; two years for AHBs providing or managing between 50 and 300 dwellings; and three years for AHBs providing or managing less than 50 dwellings. The Act was commenced on a phased basis and concerns were raised by the sector regarding the prescriptive nature of the eligibility criteria set out in section 25 of the Act.

Due to the eligibility criteria being overly prescriptive, very few AHBs would meet the criteria and as a result would not be in a position to register, causing cancellation of registration by the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority, AHBRA, by virtue of technically not meeting the registration requirements within the timeframe set out in the Act. In particular, a provision that "...all of its property, both real and personal, be applied solely in furtherance of its primary object or primary objects specified..." in the Act, means AHBs with constitutional objects outside of the primary object specified in the Act would no longer be allowed to use any property for those objects.

The timelines were extended through legislation in 2022 to allow time for consideration of the issue. The Department formulated an opinion that, in order to prevent AHBs falling out of registration due to a failure to meet the timelines set out in the 2019 Act, a more appropriate approach is to amend the Act to permanently register deemed AHBs - thus removing the need to meet the eligibility criteria - rather than require an active supply for registration before the end of the timelines. This approach is in line with the approach taken under charities regulation. The amendment is considered necessary to mitigate against the risk of AHBs that do not apply due to administrative or other constraints, or where approved housing bodies do not wish to be regulated or wish to adhere to AHBRA's standards and therefore chose not to apply to be registered, having their registrations cancelled and both the entity and their assets fall out of AHBRA's remit and powers.

As the Act further links AHBRA's powers directly to the constitutional objects in the AHB's constitution, and the above amendment will mean AHBs are no longer required to make constitutional changes nor apply for registration, further consequential amendments will rectify this so that the intended AHBRA powers come into effect regardless of whether an AHB changes its constitution by rather than referencing section 25, referencing directly a function of the AHB, namely, the alleviation of a housing need.

Overall, these amending provisions ensure existing AHBs are permanently deemed registered and remain under the regulator's remit with an active action to cancel registration required and that the regulator's powers apply to all AHBs on the register.

With regard to the other amendments proposed in the Bill, the new cost-rental sector in Ireland was given a statutory footing in Part 3 of the Affordable Housing Act 2021. This legislation introduced a new form of rental tenure targeted at middle income households above the eligibility thresholds for social housing supports, who were struggling with often acute affordability pressures in the private rental market. The introduction of the cost-based model represents a very significant contribution to the rental sector and was an action set out in the Government's Housing for All plan. Having been launched in 2021, cost-rental in Ireland while at an early stage of implementation is actually working, with almost 1,800 homes delivered nationwide to the end of quarter one of this year, and over 3,000 more approved. Building on this success, officials from my Department have been engaging with stakeholders, including our cost-rental delivery partners, to assess the lessons learned to date since the launch of cost rental. Arising from this process, a number of measures have been identified which I believe will help to further support the continued growth of this sector and strengthen its legislative framework.

As outlined in the Bill, it is now proposed to amend the Affordable Housing Act 2021 to provide for the following new elements: that providing for the Minister to prescribe eligibility requirements for different compositions of household; providing for allocation plans for particular cost-rental homes; and allocating cost-rental tenancies to tenants in situ.

By prescribing eligibility requirements for different compositions of households, this will allow for the introduction of individual household income eligibility requirements for shared households to reflect the variety of household formations which now exist and provide for two or more unrelated adults to access the benefits of a cost-rental tenancy and share the cost of the overall rent. Following the proposed amendment to the Act this will be done through regulations which I will bring forward as Minister in due course. This has been a very popular form of tenure. It is a new tenure that is growing across the country and this amendment in particular is something we have agreed with stakeholders and our delivery partners and will enable additional access for additional individuals and households to access cost-rental as this sector is growing.

The second amendment provides for cost-rental landlords to propose allocation plans for particular cost-rental homes. These are similar to the schemes of priority that are already provided under the Affordable Housing Act in respect of local authority affordable purchase homes. Under such plans, the process for allocating tenancies and the selection criteria that a cost-rental landlord may utilise when selecting potential tenants will be set out but will require ministerial approval before coming into effect. This is another measure that we have deemed appropriate to bring forward in consultation with our delivery partners and based on the experience we have had to date in delivering cost rental. The current system of allocation, a lottery to randomly select and sort all eligible applicants, will remain in place as a default option but I believe that providing scope for alternatives will allow for greater flexibility and, indeed, greater efficiency for cost-rental landlords tenanting an increasing number of homes.

The final amendment will provide for circumstances whereby a cost-rental dwelling can be provided to a tenant in situin a particular dwelling at the time of its designation under section 30 of the Act. Currently under the Act and associated regulations, a cost-rental dwelling must be allocated and leased in a transparent manner. That includes advertising the property. This cannot be done for practical reasons where there is a tenant in situ. Therefore, I am proposing to amend the Act to allow for such circumstances and for the designation of these homes as cost rental.

One further amendment will be added on Committee Stage in the Seanad to facilitate the capitalisation of the Land Development Agency, LDA, through an amendment of the National Treasury Management Agency Act 2014. This amendment was approved by the Cabinet today. I am confident that these important enabling amendments will continue to support the development of the sector as delivery increases in scale as well as providing access to cost rental to even more people.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the Minister for his opening remarks. As I am sure he knows, Sinn Féin will not be opposing the Bill. We certainly feel that the proposed changes to the registration regime for approved housing bodies are necessary and appropriately drafted, and need to be introduced as a matter of urgency. It was on that basis that our committee unanimously agreed to waive pre-legislative scrutiny, although a number of us had some concerns with respect to the second half of the Bill, which I will come to in a moment.

I thank the officials for making themselves available for the briefing and for the public session of the committee meeting last Thursday. Notwithstanding the fact that we will not carry out pre-legislative scrutiny, there is a need to further scrutinise some aspects of the Bill. To give advance warning to the officials, we need a fuller explanation of the rationale for deleting "alleviation of housing need" in section 5. I do not have an issue with it, but I would like to understand the full implications of that deletion with respect to the registration regime.

I was surprised at the inclusion of the cost-rental elements of the Bill. Unlike the registration regime for AHBs, I do not think there is an urgency for the cost-rental considerations. I am not saying that changes are not necessary and I am not saying that I am not open to supporting them, but they are not urgent. They are not the most pressing changes that are needed to the cost-rental legislation and regulations. Those elements would have benefited from consideration by the committee on pre-legislative scrutiny. While the remarks I am going to make are critical, I am making them in the hope that the Minister will consider them between now and the final passage of the Bill, and before the subsequent regulations.

My biggest concern is that those changes are not dealing with the biggest challenge for the cost-rental sector, which is the rising level of rent. Increasingly, the cost-rental units that are on offer, small in number as they are, are excluding very large numbers of the people for whom cost rental was designed, namely, those households, singles and couples on incomes above the threshold for social housing.

With respect to section 15 and the revised definition of "household" and income eligibility for single people sharing, or couples sharing, I am not opposed in principle. There is, however, a potential unintended consequence, which is that people who are not able to afford a one-bedroom cost-rental home because the rent is too high will end up in what they would hope to be a short-term sharing arrangement, perhaps at the start of their careers as a nurse or a garda, or in the private sector. They may then find themselves unable to exit cost rental either into alternative cost rental, as a household in their own right, or into other forms of tenure. They may become trapped involuntarily in sharing arrangements into their late 20s or early 30s. As the Minister knows, we are already seeing that in the private rental sector. While I understand that some of the cost-rental landlords, including, in particular the LDA, were lobbying for this as part of a way of getting around the challenge of single people accessing cost rental because they are excluded under the terms of the scheme because the rents are too high for their disposable income, this is an area where some further discussion is needed. I am not against the idea but the Minister can see the point I am making.

This speaks to one of the issues that this Bill could and should have dealt with, which is the problem with the rents. If we look at some of the recent cost-rental offerings in Citywest, where the LDA bought properties from Cairn Homes in my constituency, the rents are almost €1,400 per month for a one-bedroom unit, almost €1,600 for a two-bedroom unit and almost €1,800 for a three-bedroom unit. Those are below new market rents but are above existing Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, rents in the private market. The rents are rising more rapidly elsewhere. The rents that will be announced for properties on Oscar Traynor Road, for example, will be almost €1,200 for a one-bedroom unit, almost €1,600 for a two-bedroom unit and over €1,700 for a three-bedroom unit. The rents for O'Devaney Gardens will probably be the most expensive to date at a cost of almost €1,500 for a one-bedroom unit, almost €1,700 for a two-bedroom unit and almost €1,900 for a three-bedroom unit. The problem, of course, is that it is the result of how the scheme rightly works. Eligibility requirements mean that people should not be paying more than one third of their net disposable income on rent. An ever-growing number of people for whom this form of tenure was designed simply cannot afford it. There are solutions but the issue is not being discussed.

One of my big concerns is that there is not a single funding model for cost rental. I am aware of four separate funding models currently in operation. The LDA is off balance sheet, which means, as the Minister knows, that it must make a commercial return on its Irish Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF, capitalisation. It is charged corporation tax at a rate of 25%. It is factoring in a management and maintenance rate of 40%, which is far beyond the AHB sector. All of that pushes rents in a particular direction.

We know that the AHB sector is calculating rents in different ways. One AHB is only taking into account the repayment of the primary loan to the Housing Finance Agency when calculating rent and is dealing with the cost-rental equity loan at a later stage. Another AHB is factoring in both of those payments now, which means its rents are arguably different and higher. We know that local authorities, including mine in south Dublin, have a different way of financing their first cost-rental projects. In an attempt to bring down rents, South Dublin County Council is using some of its own reserves at an assumed rate that is 2% lower than the LDA's rate or the Housing Finance Agency's rate. It seems odd that we would at the early stages allow this proliferation of financing models. It makes no sense. Surely people can be brought into a room and asked to work out the most sensible way of financing these projects to make the rents more affordable.

We also know there are still real problems with the cost-rental equity loan. The Government has increased it to 55% but there is no clarity about what it will do with the 20% that may or may not become equity at a future stage and how that impacts the rents. We have yet to see a cost-rental project between the canals in Dublin although I have mentioned one that is in the pipeline. I am concerned about the development at Shanganagh. I do not believe that the LDA does not know the rents that will be charged. I believe it withheld the announcement of those rents from the launch event. I do not mean to rain on the Minister's parade when I say that. I am concerned that we are going to see exceptionally high rents on land that was public and for which the LDA did not have to pay market value.

I am also concerned that despite the very high levels of secure tenancy affordable rental investment scheme, STAR, subsidy to the LDA, the rents are still unaffordable. That is the case in Citywest as it will be elsewhere. I have said previously that I urge the Minister to consider the situation again. Long-term, 60-year, lower cost finance is the way to go. I have met representatives of the National Treasury Management Agency along with my colleague, Deputy Pearse Doherty. The representatives said it was possible. Until the State goes out to seek that finance, we will not know the volume or cost of it but it should be trying. The over-reliance on expensive turnkey properties is a problem. There was a failure to address new building technologies in the review of the fire safety regulations, which means we have tied our hands in terms of using some good new building technologies that are being used in London, Barcelona, Helsinki and elsewhere, and are able to deliver real cost-efficiency savings when they are done at scale. That is simply not possible here.

That is where the solution to those rents lies.

With respect to section 15 and the allocation scheme, again this is one where we could really have had a good discussion to tease it out. The idea of an allocation scheme is sensible, particularly at the early stage, but if I correctly understood the briefing from the Minister's officials, the Minister will prescribe in regulations the criteria against which allocations could be made but the cost-rental landlord will apply to the Minister to utilise some or all of those conditions to individual schemes or to their whole offering. That is the way I understood it from what the officials said. What that means is that as the volume of cost rental increases - albeit too slowly; I will come to that in a moment - we could have multiple different allocation schemes. We already know the challenge of having different allocation schemes in each local authority, but having multiple allocation schemes across the four AHBs, the LDA and the local authorities, for example, will make the situation confusing.

I do not see anything in this that would facilitate transfers across cost-rental providers. The Minister will be aware that this is a particular problem for social housing with the AHBs. If somebody is eligible for a transfer but the AHB has a small stock and cannot provide a transfer, getting a transfer from one AHB to another in social housing is virtually impossible, and it seems that problem is going to be replicated here. This is one area where we could do a good collaborative piece of work in committee with other stakeholders to get it right. If it is not right, and it is rushed through, there is going to be amending legislation next year and the year after - no matter who is in government - to try to rectify those problems. I urge the Minister to look at cost-rental transfers between cost-rental landlords. It has already come up among some of the tenants whose circumstances have changed. Even if the Minister created a mutual transfer system across the cost-rental providers, that would be eminently sensible.

With respect to provisions relating to the tenant in situscheme, I fully accept the bona fides of the officials when they told us at our private briefing that this is legally required. They said that legislation is required in order to allow an allocation to be made outside of an allocation scheme. However, the Minister must know that this is not the problem in terms of taking the properties that have been bought by the Housing Agency and transferring them into cost-rental tenancies. The Minister gave us a figure indicating that possibly 200 properties have been bought or are close to being bought by the Housing Agency. We all know that none of those are yet cost rental. The renters there are paying full market rent. The fact that they have been protected from eviction is a good thing - I welcome that – but they are paying very high market rents. When I talk to the AHB sector, the problem is that it is not interested in this scheme. There are too many barriers in terms of financing, management and maintenance, and the dispersal of the property.

When I asked an individual in an AHB what change section 16 – if I have it right - would make to those properties that are currently in limbo, the response was it would make very little, if any, difference. They were not saying that to be awkward; it was just a reflection of the reality.

This is an example of a scheme that was opened before the scheme was designed. The problem with the cost-rental tenant in situscheme is that it has never been put in a functioning framework. That is going to continue to be a problem. I am still of the view that the scheme is not advertised enough. It is too cumbersome. People should not have to go through the local authority. The people we are talking about do not have a relationship with the local authority. It is unnecessary to do that. Clearly, if they have made a mistake and they are eligible for social rental, a direct application to the Housing Agency could be redirected to the local authority. The Minister must also look at the way the scheme is funded, in particular given the age of some of these properties and the fact that refurbishment and repair needs to be taken into account as well.

One of the real challenges for the Opposition in terms of targets and delivery - the cynic in me would say it is deliberate, but I always like to at least try to give the Minister the benefit of the doubt - is that it is not clear what the annual targets are for cost rental in the LDA and the AHB sector. We have a little bit more clarity in the budget both this year and last year, but we have no clarity on what the LDA is meant to be delivering. Although the housing plan has annual targets for affordable homes that mix cost rental, affordable purchase and the first home scheme, the number of those that are meant to be cost rental is not clear at any stage.

The Minister mentions a figure of 1,800 cost-rental units delivered from 2022 to the first quarter of this year. I do not dispute that, but that is not what the Department's website says. The combined figures for 2022 to the first quarter of 2024 are 1,577. Perhaps somebody wants to check those and correct them. I do not mind which one is corrected but, either way, the delivery is very poor. It is way below the targets buried in a rather obtuse way in the Minister's plan.

That brings me to the revised targets the Minister is going to publish at the end of the year. We are all very interested to see what they are. Could he make a commitment in that regard? In addition to whatever the macro target is, and within that whatever the social and affordable target is, he should give us clarity on what he believes is needed and how many affordable-rental units are to be delivered by the local authorities, the AHB sector and the Land Development Agency.

For all his faults as Minister, the Minister's predecessor, and his predecessor, Deputy Coveney, gave us very clear targets for the publicly funded housing projects, so that we could all track them. While the Minister has continued to do that for social housing, he has not done it for affordable purchase or cost rental. The Housing Commission has made a very clear recommendation. It has said it believes at least 20% of our housing stock needs to be social and affordable. For it, affordable means cost rental. To meet that, the Minister would have to more than double the annual output of social and affordable homes. That would require a level of capital investment way beyond anything that is in the budget book, and way beyond anything that is in the national development plan.

The Minister is aware that we have set out what we believe is required in our alternative housing plan, which is an average of 5,000 cost-rental units a year over a five-year period as part of our affordable purchase scheme. We also need to start bringing those rents down. I am convinced from my conversations with the LDA, AHBs and local authorities that with the right set of policies and financing mechanisms, we could start bringing the rents of new cost rentals down to or below an average of €1,000 a month. If the Minister does not do that, the consequences will be rents continuing to rise - this will put pressure on him and his Government, if they remain in power, to increase subsidies to close the gap - and the creation of a medium-to-long term risk for cost-rental providers. There is a huge inbuilt risk right now for the AHBs in particular, but also for the LDA because their rents are above existing renters in the private rental sector. We know the private rental sector can be volatile, but what will happen in five, six or ten years' time if both existing and new rents in the private rental sector fall below cost rents? Cost rents cannot track them down; they are locked into a cost-recovery model. The idea that the State's so-called affordable cost rental would be more expensive than existing rents, which is the case today, and also new rents, is a level of risk that I do not believe the Minister has acknowledged, certainly publicly. Perhaps he has been discussing it privately with his colleagues and others. I will wait to see the outcome of that.

The Minister has given us an indication of the one amendment he will bring to the Seanad, on the capitalisation of the LDA. I remind the House that last October he attended a press conference after the budget and he announced an additional €6 billion of capitalisation for the LDA. We know he did not have approval from the Departments or Ministers for Finance and Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform. Haggling went on from October to December, when the Minister got an extra €2.5 billion in capitalisation, half of it from the ISIF last year and then another half from a source to be announced this year. The Minister seems to indicate that the additional capitalisation in the amendment will be from the ISIF. I thought it was going to be from the Minister for Finance because in his budget speech he referred to the AIB share sale. The Minister might want to clarify that in case I have it wrong. However, that still means the LDA has a shortfall of €3 billion plus in its financing arrangements to fund the target for its delivery plan out to 2028. I accept that it can borrow, but it has made it patently clear, publicly and privately, that the interest rates are too high. What that means is, today, even with the reannounced €1.25 billion that the Minister promised last October and again in December, and then announced last week, the LDA has a huge shortfall. The Minister knows my criticisms of the LDA model - not of the LDA staff or their hard work, but of the way in which LDA policy and legislation has been enacted - but even if I thought the LDA as a residential developer was a good thing, it is €3 billion short for its current business plan.

On the NewERA report, we have only seen a heavily redacted version of it under FOI but it is an important report nonetheless. It has raised significant concerns about the fact that the LDA is paying more for new build on its own land than it is for turnkeys, which makes no sense. Turnkeys obviously involve private land at market values and the private developer's margin, neither of which are costs on the LDA's own development projects on land acquired from local authorities or the Housing Agency. Also, most of what it is doing at the moment is not spending money now but, rather, entering into forward purchase arrangements for homes that will be delivered in 2026, 2027 and 2028. There are real questions over the deliverability of that business plan. I appeal to the Minister to use his influence with the Minister for public expenditure and reform and the Minister for Finance to allow that NewERA report to be published in full and to allow full transparency for the public and for Members of the Oireachtas. We need to see the extent of the challenges that NewERA, as the watchdog, in part, of these kinds of State agencies, has identified in respect of the ability of the LDA to deliver.

My own view, and I make no apologies for it, is that the LDA should not be involved in residential development. It was such a missed opportunity not to have a Land Development Agency solely focused on active land management. That is what the original version in the national planning framework called for. Unfortunately that original wording has been removed from the revised draft. Unless we actually have an active land management agency with comprehensive compulsory purchase order powers, including existing use value compulsory purchase order powers, then whoever we task with delivering social and affordable homes will not have the adequate pipeline of land required to meet either the Government's inadequate and modest public housing targets or the far more ambitious targets that many of us, Sinn Féin, the Housing Commission and other members of the Opposition have. I would appreciate in the session with the officials on Thursday if they could come back on some of these issues. Likewise, I would appreciate if one of the Ministers of State in the Department could respond to some of these points in conclusion. I reserve the right to introduce amendments on Committee Stage to the cost rental elements of the Bill because I do think they need significantly more work.

Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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We will be supporting the Bill. The provisions, though technical as regards the regulation of AHBs, are an important tidying-up exercise. It is welcome that we are getting rid of this administrative burden and ensuring they remain under a proper regulatory framework. On the cost rental tenant in situ scheme, we are glad to see legislation being introduced to underpin it. The scheme could have a real impact for those who are just outside the criteria for other social housing supports but it needs to be given the teeth to do so. It is concerning that a year after the scheme was established, only 32 properties had been purchased, none of the tenants of which had been moved onto the cost rental model at that point. I am not sure if more recent data is available yet. It does not reflect well. There were approximately 100 more properties at various stages of the process at that time but really even that is a paltry number. I understand this legislation is intended to address issues that might have caused delays, which is welcome. However, the fact that only 32 properties had been purchased a year into the scheme does raise concerns. It gives the impression that the scheme was cobbled together at the last minute as a means of softening the blow of ending the eviction ban that had been in place. It would also appear that there was little, if any, engagement with AHBs in developing the scheme, although it is intended they will eventually take over the houses purchased from the Housing Agency, as we understand it.

I certainly hope that getting this scheme on a statutory footing will help to get it moving but its performance to date leaves more to be desired. In some cases, we are seeing landlords who were willing to sell their property under the scheme abandon it due to the long delays. Perhaps most concerning is the apparent lack of interest. Only 282 houses were offered. That is a drop in the ocean when compared with the level of eviction notices we have seen since the eviction ban was overturned. Again, if the Government really intends this scheme to be successful, it needs to give it teeth. That means giving local authorities and the Housing Agency the resources to step in and it means actually promoting the scheme to landlords and tenants. It is difficult to get on board with the idea that the Government really believes in the scheme when in June of this year the Minister placed a cap on the number of homes local authorities can acquire.

This is a good scheme in principle. It is a step in the right direction, moving away from private rental subsidies to actual State-led housing provision. We were slightly dismayed, therefore, when we read that in the same ministerial circular that capped local authority housing acquisitions, the Minister's Department instructs councils to direct tenants at risk of homelessness towards HAP or the RAS scheme. These are exactly the type of things we should be moving away from, using public money to subsidise excessive market rents. We should be encouraging local authorities and AHBs to acquire homes, building up our social housing stock and providing genuinely affordable homes. We should be looking to expand these sorts of schemes and not hampering them or limiting them in any way. I hope this Bill provides the impetus for the Government to really commit to this scheme.

Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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I fully support the Bill. All of us have housing issues around the country. I can only speak about County Carlow. The rents now are extraordinary and people are finding them so hard. We are looking at from €1,600 to €1,700, which is a lot of money. The reason is lack of supply. Carlow is now a university town and while this is brilliant and we welcome it, we need more houses. Recently, the county development plans were done. There were lands zoned and lands dezoned because the Department sent down a directive about it. Were the lands that had services on them made a priority so that it would actually hurry up the build of houses? At the moment we have lands that are zoned with no services, and lands that are serviced and dezoned. The Department needs to look at this. Carlow County Council sought expressions of interest from landowners for the purchase of land for social housing in Carlow town urban area. I was contacted by someone who had permission on his land for eight houses yet the council never came back to him. While this is a really good Bill and I fully support it, we need to look at our county development plans. We need to make sure planning and services are in place so that people can build houses on serviced sites and get them through quickly. That is one of the biggest issues.

I welcome the tenant in situ scheme, which is really important. I have people telling me the council does not have the money to purchase. They qualify for it and should be getting it. While I welcome that we are promoting this, I am told they have come to the Department and there is no funding. I am working on two cases where they are not being purchased. While it is great that we have this Bill, we have to make sure that when we are promoting something and bringing in legislation, the funding is there for it. I really want to find out more about this.

Planning is such a big issue, along with housing and the building of houses, in Carlow. I do not know if funding this year has been on the scale it was on previously. I thank the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, because a week ago, Carlow County Council had no money for housing adaptation grants, for the builds and stuff like that. In fairness, nearly €800,000 was given to Carlow County Council. The issue is that the only thing that can be done on that is roofs and electrical. No persons who have applied for windows and doors can get their grants. How do we get more funding into Carlow County Council? How do we solve this? How do we look at building more houses? Now that we are a university town and county, we need to put in plans for student accommodation. We need to have the serviced sites. We need to work with Carlow County Council. In fairness to the council, it has been working really hard, for example on building local authority houses.

We need far more affordable houses, of course. We need to build more affordable housing.

So many parents come to me saying their children do not qualify for the council housing list or for a mortgage and ask whether we can look at getting more affordable houses. That is the road to go down. The more we build, the better it will be. People are falling between not being able to get a mortgage and not being able to go onto the local authority housing list. I know that things change and that, over the years, we have perhaps moved into more of a culture of renting, but in Ireland we always bought our own homes and encouraged that. If there is a lack of supply, we need to build houses.

Earlier I attended a presentation on a survey relating to elderly people and their concerns. Approximately 25% of the respondents to the survey had indicated that a family member had come back home to live with them because they could not buy or rent a house. While these people, who were elderly, were glad to have their family member back, we do not want it to be the case that nobody can either get a mortgage or go onto the local authority housing list, and I am told there is now no funding for the tenant in situ scheme.

What funding is there for these houses? What else can we do? We have done a lot, and I compliment the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, the Minister of State and the team. A lot of good work has been done. More houses have been built now than have ever been built but that has been the case only in the past few years. The couples and families I am dealing with say they just want to own their own home, go onto the local authority list or get a mortgage. While the Bill is a good step and I really welcome it, we have a lot more to do.

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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We are not opposing the Bill. We recognise the important role that approved housing bodies have in delivering housing in many parts of the country, not least when it comes to affordable rent. The reality, however, in the Minister of State's county, County Mayo, as well as in counties Leitrim and Sligo, not one affordable house has been built under this Government, and that is a problem. The previous speaker spoke about County Carlow and I understand it is the same there. In vast areas of the regions outside of our major cities, there are no affordable houses for people, and that is a huge crisis for many families. As the previous speaker said, many people are in the locked-in position whereby they do not have enough income to be able to buy a house on the inflated markets that now exist, yet they are above the limits set by local authorities to get onto their lists or to get assistance through HAP or anything else. They are trapped in the middle and there is nothing they can do. A lot of them are young professionals. We send them to college, spend a lot of money educating them and get them decent jobs, but they find they cannot have a chance of buying a house, having an income or having a future in Ireland, so they head for Australia, Canada or somewhere else.

That is the story of many families throughout the country, whether they support the Government or the Opposition. They are all in the same boat here. It is totally intolerable that one of the wealthiest countries in the world cannot come up with solutions to house its own people. If there is anything we can do to bring home to the Government the level of desperation and frustration out there among the general public, it simply has to sit up and listen. Thousands and thousands of our people are asking what they are going to do and what hope they have for the future if they cannot have or buy a home. If they cannot buy a home, the main reason is that they cannot afford one at the inflated prices, and if they are renting, their rent is so high that they cannot save for a deposit even if they could hope to get a mortgage in the future.

This is not just a crisis in our urban areas. It is a crisis throughout the country, and the Government needs to recognise that. It simply has to come up with solutions that will provide for that. Part of those solutions relates to the approved housing bodies, and they have a role to play as do other agencies and our local authorities. One of the issues that has been pointed out time and again is that our local authorities are all the time hamstrung with rules and regulations and with the absence of funding to be able to deliver the numbers of local authority houses they need to deliver, but also to deliver houses in the cost-rental and affordable sector, which they do not do. We do not have that in the west. In the north west, not one affordable house has been delivered. That has to be an indictment of the Ministers and Government TDs who have come in here and supported the Government for the past four and a half years. Despite doing that, they are going to go back to the people and tell them that everything is rosy in the garden and that they should vote for them again and put them back in government, when not even one affordable house in counties Leitrim, Sligo or Mayo has been delivered by this Government.

Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats)
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I agree with the previous two speakers regarding the overall delivery of affordable cost-rental housing. It is way off what is needed. There is no question about that, and it is especially the case given we have multi-billion euro surpluses available that could, of course, be put into affordable housing.

The Bill is no way to do legislation. I accept that parts of it are urgent, such as those relating to AHB registration, with which I have no issue, but other parts are not urgent and should have been done in the proper way with pre-legislative scrutiny. Indeed, having the deadline for amendments at 11 o'clock on a day last week, when Second Stage of the Bill is happening today, is not the way to do legislation. The whole idea of setting the deadline for amendments after Second Stage is so that we can hear the contributions of the Minister and the other Members, which can form part of helping people formulate amendments. Rushing through steps in this manner is not the way to go, and it has been a hallmark of the Minister. In fact, there does not seem to be any regard for the legislative process or for getting input from the Dáil.

In respect of approved housing bodies and cost rental, I want to hear from the Minister of State what the long-term thinking is with regard to one issue. Clearly, there is some evidence of approved housing bodies shifting social housing stock into cost rental when their financing arrangements have concluded. This, of course, could lead in the long term to a continuous reduction in our levels of social housing stock, which has been part of our current problem. Not only have we not started to build enough social homes but we have not held on to enough of them. I want to hear from the Minister of State what the long-term thinking here is in the context of what safeguards will be put in place to protect our social housing stock, or whether a different view is being taken. Is a view being taken in line with what was recommended in the Housing Commission whereby the long-term plan is to convert a lot of that social housing stock into cost-rental stock while maintaining it as social housing tenancies if there is a need to subsidise low-income tenants? It would be good to hear the thinking of the Minister of State and the Government on this. Part of what we have missed by not having the pre-legislative scrutiny is that those kinds of issues and potential safeguards in the form of long-term thinking have not been teased out.

Comprehensive research on cost rental was recently carried out by Dr. Mick Byrne, Dr. Sarah Sheridan, Dr. Robert Sweeney and Dr. Cian O'Callaghan - not a bad name but it is not me. Their research on the sector is good and shows that it is successful tenure. It shows that tenants are generally very happy and that it is a much better place to be than the private rented sector in terms of security, standards and how it is managed. It does highlight that affordability is an issue and it specifically shows that affordability is an issue for between one third and one quarter of households in cost rental. It also shows that there are as many households paying more in rent now in the cost-rental sector than they were in the private rented sector than there are households paying less than in the private rented sector. It points out that, by and large, those households are reasonably happy with the situation they are in, with new accommodation that is better managed and often larger than that in the private rented sector, but still that affordability is an issue. Of course, this research, the authors point out, does not capture those who are deemed ineligible for cost rental on affordability grounds and cannot get into the sector. People who do not qualify for social housing would love to be eligible for cost rental but do not qualify for it. We need to hear, in the context of cost rental, what the Minister and the Government are doing to address this.

Another aspect of the Bill relates to affordable housing in Gaeltacht areas.

The Minister recently launched a new cost-rental scheme in Bearna to much fanfare. However, there are no language conditions attached to the scheme. It will not assist with the protection of Irish in the Gaeltacht area. The Minister said there cannot be language conditions under existing legislation. When asked about the cost-rental scheme in Bearna in an article on Tuairisc.ie two weeks ago, a spokesperson for the Department of housing said it was examining how housing is distributed under the Affordable Housing Act and how that process could be improved, including any amendments to legislation that might be necessary. That was a direct response to queries about the lack of language conditions attached to the scheme in the Gaeltacht. This miscellaneous provisions Bill includes nothing to address the protection of the Irish language in the Gaeltacht. Why is that so when other measures have been progressed? The language is under threat in Gaeltacht areas due to planning failures. That needs to be addressed. The Government gave a commitment almost three years ago that planning guidelines would be issued to Gaeltacht planning authorities regarding their statutory obligations to protect the Irish language in their areas. Those guidelines still have not been issued. I hope the Minister of State will tell us whether they will be issued in the lifetime of the Government.

This morning, I attended a briefing by the National Women's Council of Ireland regarding its research on the urgent need to ban sex-for-rent practices. Its research shows that women who are at risk of homelessness or in a situation of housing precarity, women on low incomes, migrants and those fleeing domestic violence are most at risk from exploitative sex-for-rent practices. The council also pointed out that there are currently no legal protections for tenants who make a complaint against a landlord attempting to exploit them in this way. We were told by Ministers that offences could be prosecuted under different legislation. However, the council's research shows that, in practice, while there is sympathy and support from the Garda when complaints are made to it, the complainants are told that nothing can be done under existing legislation and it is a civil matter. This contrasts quite starkly with the situation in the workplace, where there are, rightly, protections whereby employers and employees can be prosecuted under sexual harassment legislation. There is no equivalent protection for people when they are harassed in this way in their home or potential home. It is not acceptable that people could be exposed to this behaviour in their home, which is the place where they retreat to feel safe. When I introduced my Ban on Sex for Rent Bill in 2022, the Government gave a commitment to bring forward its own legislation in this area. We are still waiting for it. The Government has failed to take action. It is fast-tracking this Bill through the Oireachtas but we are still waiting for a measure it promised years ago to protect vulnerable renters. There is no sign the Government will act on it. Why is that the case?

Reference was made to the Housing Commission. Its members have done excellent work and made very detailed recommendations in their report. That report was published last May and there has been no discussion of it since then in the Dáil, despite our repeated requests that it be properly discussed. At the time, we got a fairly perfunctory statement from the Minister and the Department that most of the recommendations in the report were either already implemented or being implemented. Professor Michelle Norris, a member of the commission, had to publicly state that she did not waste the previous couple of years of her life on a report making recommendations that were already under way. The Department's statement was quite insulting to the work done by the commission members. The Government set up the commission and invited people to give their time to participate in it. The members brought forward a very detailed report with a huge number of recommendations. The least the Government can do is give time in the Dáil for some proper consideration and discussion of those recommendations.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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It is outrageous that the debate on this Bill is being guillotined. I still do not fully understand all the implications of the legislation. This way of proceeding is wrong. As my party's spokesperson on housing, I consider myself fairly clued in and focused on the issues. This legislation is not being given adequate scrutiny is to what precisely it does. That is a problem and a matter of concern to me. I listened to what the Minister said earlier about the Bill and I will listen to what the Minister of State says at the end of the debate. We probably will vote for the Bill but I have concerns. Given the absolutely atrocious housing crisis in this country, there is no more important subject than housing and, specifically, the delivery of social and affordable housing by approved housing bodies by way of cost rental. I am concerned that legislation dealing with AHBs and the cost-rental sector is being rammed through in this manner. It is way out of order. This is the kind of scenario in which things can be done that might have consequences that could be of concern.

One of the Bill's stated objectives, if I understood the Minister correctly, is to provide for the registration of all AHBs that would otherwise go over a cliff edge and become technically ineligible to operate. That situation will be rectified in order that they can continue to operate. Otherwise, they would become unregistered, if I understood correctly. This has something to do with our constitutional objectives and the question of meeting housing need. I did not hear any example from the Minister in his speech as to where there was a problem in terms of the constitutional objects of AHBs in respect of their property. What might be the problem? We need examples. What other objectives might they have for their assets that are not about alleviating housing need? The very least the Minister of State owes us is an explanation as to what those problems might be.

I have a concern arising from the experience of the growth of the AHB sector in Britain as a substitute for local authority housing. I recognise the role AHBs play. Many of them do a very good job in providing social housing and cost-rental housing. However, I am worried that some AHBs, particularly in the UK, have developed commercial agendas and imperatives that are not really about the provision of social housing. They have become quite corporate. I would not like to see anything slipping in under the radar that would allow that sort of situation to develop here. In my area, most of the new social housing coming on stream is coming via the AHBs rather than the local authority. For all the Government's talk about ramping up social housing delivery, most of it, in fact, is not being provided by local authorities creating new council housing. The provision is being delivered via, or bought by, the AHBs and will be managed and run by those AHBs. As I said, AHBs should play a role in the delivery of social housing. Many of them do commendable work. However, I have serious concerns about the continued retreat of local authorities from being the central driving force in delivering social housing. My belief is that there is a longer-term agenda in this regard. In fact, it is fairly well articulated at a lot of meetings of housing experts and groups. In essence, the agenda is about doing away with differential rents, as we know them in local authority areas, and replacing them with cost-rental provision, thereby, in effect, doing away with social housing for a lot of people in the long term.

I believe that is an agenda. I think certain people believe local authority rents are too low, that we need to increase them and that cost rental and keeping social housing thresholds fairly low are a vehicle to do away with traditional council rent and differential rent. I am concerned about all these things.

Seeing as we are discussing AHBs, I will also express concern about a particular development in my area, which I hope the Department will look into, St. Germaine in Ballybrack village, which was bought by an AHB in conjunction with the council. The tenants moved in three to six months ago. There are 31 homes there, and the residents are mostly women and young children. The place is chronic with damp. This is new-build and there is damp everywhere. These families were delighted after many years on housing lists to get housed, but it is absolutely shocking beyond belief that houses that were newly built and that people have just moved into are rank with damp. Are we here all over again with the Celtic tiger in terms of stuff being built and now bought for social and affordable housing with public money but where there are serious defects? That needs to be looked into as a matter of urgency. I have advised the tenants, whom I am working with now. There are also problems with the green areas. The building has not been built to the plans, according to the tenants. I wonder about the role of the local authority, seeing as this was bought in conjunction with the local authority. Even that relationship between approved housing bodies and local authorities is a very important one. That is why I really worry about legislation that deals with that. Will this create less accountability as to what approved housing bodies do in terms of the delivery of social housing? Somebody did not do their due diligence here if the place is rank with damp and, according to the tenants at least, not built to the plans. Responsibility has not been taken for the green areas that were designated, for example. They are not built as people understood from the plans. I hope something is done about that. I have advised the tenants that they have the right to go to the RTB but, quite frankly, they should not have to do so after three to six months in new social housing. It is unbelievable, and it is not the first instance of this I have heard.

I hope the following is a better story. It is slightly on the other end of the spectrum. We have been campaigning for many years now to get the State to buy the St. Helen's Court development in Dún Laoghaire, which was in the hands of two different vulture funds that tried to mass-evict all the tenants, essentially to drive up the value of it, because if you evict all the tenants, you can then increase the rent. There have been 15, now up to 17, of those apartments in that development sitting empty for almost a decade right across the road from my office. It is absolutely shameful. These vulture funds wanted to try to mass-evict people. It was only because we resisted and protested and campaigned that none of those tenants were made homeless. We campaigned to get the State to buy the homes so they could be provided for social and affordable housing, but nearly a decade on they are still empty. I understand that Clúid was trying to buy them and the sale fell through. The last I heard was that Simon was trying to buy them. It would be a victory for people power and our campaign if eventually they were to be bought, but why on earth is it taking this long? In this case, maybe due diligence is being done, but that is a lot of due diligence and I see other places being perfectly refurbished. It is an insult to families who are homeless in our area, who are in emergency accommodation and hostels in town, who are coming into my office week in, week out, in desperate housing crisis situations, that right across the road 17 apartments lie empty. They are perfectly good apartments. In fact, they were refurbished a number of years ago and they are sitting empty. It is a disgrace. They are still in the hands of a vulture fund. It is to be hoped they will soon be in the hands of an approved housing body. Again, I do not quite know why it is not the local authority that is taking them. I do not really understand that. Who is making these decisions that it is an approved housing body and not the local authority? I am in favour of these purchases. I want to see more of them, given the slow delivery of direct construction of social and affordable housing, but can we do it right? That is another point I wanted to make.

To move on to the cost-rental end of things, there is a big problem with cost rental. Some of the others may have alluded to it. I have raised it several times. To be eligible for cost rental, you need to have an income below €66,000 and above €40,000 if you are single, or above €40,500 and all the way up to about €48,000 for some of the biggest families. That is in our area. I know these figures vary from area to area. The problem is that most of the people who are just over the social housing income threshold will not be eligible because they will be considered unable to pay the rents being charged for cost rental. They will be between the two brackets, as in they are earning and are not entitled to social housing, but because the approved housing bodies, the developers or whoever it is who is running the cost rental are charging rents that are too high, they will be told, "No, you cannot afford that rent. You are not eligible." These are precisely the people who have been hard done by with the refusal of the Government to raise the social housing income thresholds. Many of these people will have been on housing lists for ten or 15 years, thinking that eventually they will get there and get allocated a social home. Then they get a pay rise which takes them slightly over the income threshold. All their 15 years waiting on the social housing list is gone and now they are not entitled to cost rental either because their income is still too low because it is just over the threshold and not enough to pay the rents being charged for the cost rental, such as €1,400 for a two-bed, or €1,200 or €1,300.

I rang a council worker who got knocked off the social housing list and was really frustrated about that fact. He was an outdoor worker in the council when the new cost rental was being delivered in Enniskerry. I rang him really excited and said, "I know you lost all your years on the social housing list, but you might be able to get one of these cost-rental homes." Then he took one look at it and said, "You must be kidding. I am a council worker. The rent is €1,200 a month. I am a single person. How could I possibly afford that?" Of course, he is right; he cannot afford it. However, he is not entitled to social housing either. Something has to be done about this. Either we lower the rents for the cost rental, based on people's income and ability to pay, or we raise significantly the social housing income thresholds to make those who are caught in this limbo position eligible for something. Of course, if you go over the threshold, you are also not entitled to HAP, so you are not entitled to anything. You are completely caught in limbo: cannot afford cost rental, cannot get HAP to get housing in the private market and not entitled to social housing. It is absolutely crazy.

Something this Bill should have dealt with is what happens if you are in a cost-rental house and your income goes down. What happens if you are deemed eligible on income grounds but then your income goes down for some reason, for example, you lose your job, and you go below the threshold? Maybe it just goes down and you are still within the cost-rental limits but you now have less money to pay the rent, which is fixed because it is not based on your income. What are you supposed to do? Will you get any financial support in the form of HAP? No, because you are over the social housing threshold. You should do but you will not unless this is rectified. If you go below the social housing income thresholds, will the cost-rental tenancy now become a social housing tenancy because you are now below the threshold for cost-rental housing and above the threshold for social housing?

These issues need to be addressed but they are not being addressed.

There is this business in the Bill about the allocation scheme for cost rental. As I understand it, there is a problem. Currently, it is a lottery to get it, which is fair enough on one level. It is a bit fairer than what is going to happen in Dún Laoghaire with the affordable housing in Shanganagh this Wednesday. The scandal over the Oasis tickets will look like a tea party compared to what is going to happen on the website of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council when the 50 or so affordable houses go up. It is whoever gets in first at 12 o'clock. I suspect the website will crash. What happens then? It will not surprise me if it crashes because there is going to be such a demand for those houses. I do not see how it is possibly fair, to be honest. The number of hoops people will have to jump through online is going to be a nightmare for huge numbers of people. It is going to be an absolute nightmare. We will see how that works out.

We have to have a fair allocation scheme for these things. In this Bill, if I understand it right, landlords and developers can make an allocation scheme which is different from the local authority allocation scheme. While the local authority allocation scheme is problematic, at least it is democratically accountable. There is at least some prospect of elected representatives of the people saying we need to change the housing allocation scheme to prioritise homeless people, for example. On what basis will landlords or developers be changing the allocation scheme and to whom will they be accountable in that regard? I have concerns about their ability or their right to do it and what sort of allocation scheme they might establish.

One group of people who should get some priority is precisely those people who may have had ten or 15 years on a housing list but lost them all because they went a few quid over the threshold. There is not going to be any dispensation for them. After all those years waiting, they will just lose it all. They are going to be in a lottery with limited opportunities or chances of actually ending up with a cost-rental home. There needs to be serious deliberation about how we are going to do the allocations. I am bit worried, given we have so many different AHBs and it is such a fragmented sector, about the sort of allocation schemes they might come up with, how exactly all of that will be made transparent and whether there will be accountability, consistency, fairness and so on. I am concerned in this regard.

On a more general point, it is incredible to me that, in the budget last week, with the biggest budget surplus the State has probably ever seen and with the €13 billion extra available from the Apple tax money, the Government announced plans for social and affordable housing in which there was not a single extra social, affordable or cost-rental home over and above what had been previously committed in a plan that is failing disastrously and is not impacting on the level of homelessness or the housing crisis which is blighting the lives of thousands of people. I cannot understand it. Whatever about using once-off windfall payments for current expenditure, it makes absolute prudential sense, as well as societal sense, to put those billions of euro into dramatically ramping up the number of social and affordable housing and into making sure social and affordable housing is actually affordable for the people it is supposed to be assisting. We got nothing new in the budget on any of that, which is really shocking. It begs the question whether the Government is serious at all about trying to solve this problem.

Johnny Mythen (Wexford, Sinn Fein)
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Sinn Féin agrees with this Bill and recognises the urgency to make necessary changes to fully register all approved housing bodies, which account for approximately 61,000 dwellings, either owned, leased or managed by AHBs throughout the country. We see AHBs as an important cog in the supply of cost-rental and affordable homes, particularly for the homeless, elderly citizens and for both young couples and single people who find themselves being presented with notices of termination through no fault of their own, which is usually caused by the selling of the property or a substantial hike in the rent. There are approximately 5,000 notices to quit every quarter nationwide. In fact, in my constituency, I am aware of five families in the last week finding themselves in such a situation. In each case, the landlords increased the rents beyond their means or the property was put up for sale. It is devastating to see the anguish and the fear and to witness the soul-destroying effect this has on everyone involved, especially those who have been part of a community for many years. Many of the families involved do not qualify for social housing and are trapped in financial quandary, being barely over the limit to qualify for social housing or social payments.

Rents in County Wexford have averaged €900 to €1,000 per month and are hitting the €1,200 mark in some urban areas. In my constituency, rents have risen 8.7%, while new rents are up 11.5% and creeping monthly into an upward trajectory. There are no rent freezes in Wexford. Some 0% of cost-rental or affordable homes were delivered in County Wexford in 2022, 2023 or 2024.

Housing is one of the biggest issues on young people’s minds, particularly with renters. We have the highest rents, house prices and number of homelessness and children in emergency accommodation ever on record. Homeless emergency accommodation spend has almost doubled in Wexford this year, which tells its own story and demonstrates the seriousness of the growing situation and the need for affordable and cost-rental accommodation to come on stream as soon as possible.

We recognise the need for the Bill and the necessary registration and regulation of AHBs, as well as the important role they will have in providing cost-rental and affordable housing now and into the future.

Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent)
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I will speak for eight minutes and share my remaining time with Deputies Canney and Shanahan, who will have eight minutes and four minutes, respectively.

I have spoken on the topic of housing more than anything else in the Chamber. It is regrettable the Minister, Deputy O’Brien, is not present. No matter what way we discuss this issue, it is about the basic economics of supply and demand. Until such time as we solve the supply issue with housing, we are never going to be able to deal with the demand. The definition of cost rental, as based on the LDA website, states:

Cost Rental is a new housing tenure that was created under the Affordable Housing Act 2021. It offers a long-term, secure rental option that will contribute to the development of a sustainable housing market in Ireland which provides choice across all tenures. The rent on these units is based on the cost of building, managing, and maintaining the homes.

As it is part of the 2021 Act, it is probably well outdated because costs have increased exponentially and Government has not brought anything forward that is reducing cost. As a matter of fact, every time it takes a measure, it increases costs.

Cost-rental or affordable homes are not being bandied around very much, particularly in Wexford. It is horrible to stand here, after all the work and money which has been spent, and say that we built modular builds for €442,000, which have a C2 energy rating. They are almost eligible for a grant for an upgrade. They are modular builds. Affordable my tonsils. It is actually head wrecking for people to try to comprehend where this is going wrong. There are solutions, but Government continues to throw good money after bad policy. The bad policy, that is, our planning policy, has been pointed out a number of times. It is a policy based on transport-orientated infrastructure. We were told only last week of the 50,000 grants of planning in Dublin which will not be commenced because they are not viable.

I believed for a long time that civil servants in the Department and politicians understood what viability was, but clearly they are not tackling the problem. A lack of viability is where the economic cost of something outweighs the benefits. Therefore, if 50,000 proposed units with planning permission are not built, it is because it costs more to build them than they can be sold for. That is the complaint of the builders and developers, whom the Government has not been listening to. If it continues not to listen, we will continue to have these conversations.

I have made a proposal in this regard several times. It is not just mine as it has also been made by builders and developers, because we know how much pressure builders and developers are under from a financing perspective. Who in their right mind would finance something that would cost more to build than it could be sold for? Very few, except the Government, which will continue to subsidise unviable building.

In the context of the fact we now know the Government is going to miss its housing targets for 2024, it is time to look at the bigger picture and introduce a measure it has refused steadfastly to introduce, namely, a VAT rate of zero for new builds. This has been introduced in the UK, including Northern Ireland, and it is the very boost a first-time buyer unable to obtain a mortgage under macroprudential rules requires. The extension of the provision stipulating an amount that is four times one’s earnings no longer cuts it because of the cost of building. People just cannot afford the mortgage. At least if we removed the VAT, it would effectively mean a bonus of €40,000 to €50,000 for a first-time buyer. We could then apply the first-time buyer's grant to second-hand properties, so someone who could afford only a second-hand property or could not avail of a new build would have an option.

How can this be done? It is done very simply. In this regard, let me refer to the criteria in the UK. To have first-time buyer status there, the buyer should not have previously owned or had a major interest in any residential property. The property purchase price must be lower than £625,000 – luckily, we are still below that here, although I am not sure for how long – and the property must be intended as the main family home. The rate of zero is applied exclusively to individual purchases. It is applied to a single dwelling only and is not applicable to non-residential construction. What could be fairer than that?

In 1997, the then Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, did not just cut capital gains tax – nobody was selling anything as the rate was 40% - rather, he halved the rate to 20% and in so doing increased the tax take. Surely everybody in this House, on the left and right, can understand that 13.5% of nothing is nothing. If we do not do something radical, we will not have commencements or see cost-rental, affordable or other housing. People know it. The builders, developers, the CSO and the ESRI know it, and every newspaper in the country is reporting on it. There was a missed opportunity in this area in the budget, I am afraid, but now is the time to rectify the problem and introduce the radical measure I propose.

The Government will miss its targets this year and will not be able to set targets that are achievable next year, or even in the next ten years, and we have a deficit of more than 250,000 houses. Therefore, the Government is a long way off solving the supply-and-demand issue. I will not repeat myself but simply state that until such time as this is addressed, we will have a major crisis. It is affecting our foreign direct investment. We have seen poor infrastructural planning and poor infrastructural investment in our water and electricity services. How has it served us? A €35 billion Amazon project is to be moved to France, Spain or Germany. It was ours for the taking, but because of our poor planning and poor planning policy on top of our infrastructure planning issues, we have lost it. The Government has lost it. Therefore, it is time to sit up, take notice and start listening to the people who know – the builders and developers. Like it or lump it, we cannot proceed without them. Any notion we could set up a public building company to take care of this matter is only that – a notion – because Irish Water, which is ten years in being, is not being resourced properly. It is time to sit up and take notice.

Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important issue. It is the issue of the day. Not alone is it affecting young people, it is also affecting the economy. FDI companies in expansion mode cannot deliver housing in the areas where they need it so their workers can have a decent standard of living commensurate with that expected among workers of a global company at local level. This affects Dublin but it affects the regions more. If we have companies in expansion mode and can build houses in the regions, we should be doing the latter. The reason we are not is there are four fundamentals that are wrong.

Our planning laws are wrong. The Minister of State will know there is currently an issue in Loughrea concerning the zoning of amenity land. It will be on the Minister of State's desk one of these days. It should not be on his desk. Rather, it should be decided by councillors locally, as should all local area plans. However, because Government policy stipulates we have to have a core strategy, and because that core strategy stipulates we can zone only so much land based on predicted population increases, we are actually restricting the amount of land we zone and keeping the price high.

Much of the land zoned will never be available. Some of the land we are zoning is being farmed and the farmers do not even know it has been zoned, yet we say that because the zoned land has been designated R1, it represents our core strategy. In this regard, consider the case of towns around the country that have had no private housing built since 2007. Tuam is the largest county town in Galway and there has been no private housing built there in that period. We have had a fair bit of social housing, and some approved housing bodies have built houses, but there has been no affordable housing built. The latter does not work in Tuam because the maths do not work. Planning permissions granted under the strategic infrastructure arrangements have run out because proceeding was not viable. We need to ensure there is plenty of land available and zoned.

Second, we need to address the fact that wastewater facilities are not available where we need them in our towns and villages. The Government has announced a €1 billion package for Irish Water. Three years ago, it announced an allocation of €50 million for wastewater treatment plants around the country. Two towns in Galway were allocated funding but nothing has been done to deliver on the works other than paperwork. That is an issue. We need to have the infrastructure in place if we are to deliver houses where needed.

The other issue that is considerable relates to procurement and the building cost codes. There are so many checks and balances in all our public works that it is no wonder Irish Water is not delivering what we expected it to deliver. It is no wonder TII has reduced and suspended some of the contracts it was supposed to go ahead with this year. The reason is the bodies spend so much money making sure everything is right, they end up not getting any value for money. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the public spending code and the procurement methods we use. To go back a step, we also need to consider the public works contracts for the delivery of infrastructure. They are too confrontational and do not deliver value for money as they should.

Next is the question of how we are going to change things. Policy has to change. Housing bodies can deliver housing and manage it well, with people on the ground all the time managing it, yet our local authorities do not have enough housing liaison officers to deal with the application process or examine behaviour on social housing sites. In one case in Tuam, houses built under a scheme in the eighties were demolished approximately 20 years later because they had fallen into dereliction as they had not been managed right.

The officials in the Chamber should take heed of this. We are building plenty of social houses now. We are getting there, building up and creating momentum. I have no faith, however, that the local authorities in this country are capable of managing this new housing stock, never mind the old housing stock. The new housing stock is different because it has air to water, solar panels and all the mod cons. Who is going to maintain that, make sure it is kept in high order and ensure we get the payback on that investment? More money needs to go into the maintenance of this country's housing stock. Taxpayers' money went into it. Let us not just leave the stock there to fall into disrepair. Let us manage it properly. That is important. If we do not, we are only wasting more money.

Irish Water is a key component in providing infrastructure. If we cannot resource it properly and let it at it, rather than creating a huge number of bureaucratic gateways of approvals every time it needs to do something, we are spending money on time - and time is a cost - without giving us anything. It is very important that we change the head-wreck in all of that. It is important for the simple reason that the young people in my constituency who are working in Galway but living in the east of the county are getting the same wages as the people who live in the city. The problem is that somebody who wants to apply for social housing in the county is on a different threshold from someone in the city. I cannot figure it out or understand it. I do not know why that is. What is the logic behind all of the useless constraints and unexplainable rules and regulations, which are not adding anything, but taking from the whole situation? Housing is the issue of the day in Galway East. I will continue to highlight the fallacies in the policies that are in place at the moment, be it planning, procurement or delivery.

Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent)
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I concur with my two colleagues.

The Bill before us today may be progressive, but again, we are tinkering around the edges regarding the whole issue of construction in this country. As I have said in this House before - others have said it too - at some point we are probably going to have to call the issue of housebuilding in this country a crisis. It has to be treated like a crisis. Unfortunately, we have not done that. We have loaded bureaucracy onto the system over the last ten years. We are seeing it now right across planning and development with Irish Water, access to ESB networks, roads, planning approvals and the planning appeals board.

I was speaking to someone earlier today about planning and AHBs. The person told me that when applications for new schemes are dealt with, they ran to eight to ten pages some years ago but now run to approximately 80 pages in terms of the business plan. Imagine sitting down, trying to compile it, read it and then trying to comply with it. We heard recently that the last national planning framework used census population data from 2016, which means that the increase of nearly 1 million in our population in the meantime has been completely missed in our housing targets. During that time, we dezoned lands that had access to utilities and now we are trying to figure out a way of getting them zoned again.

The other thing which is very noticeable to me, as somebody who is around the SME space, is the lack of new builders coming into the marketplace despite all that is going on with housing and all the work that is there for tradesmen. Look around, watch the vans on the roads and see what new names come up as building contractors. I do not see them. There is no evidence. There is a fundamental reason for this. Many people are happy to work in the trade, but nobody wants to get into building in any significant way because it is so difficult to make money at it now with the costs that are involved in it. One of the significant costs to builders at the moment is access to finance. The pillar banks are not lending to the construction sector. Small builders are accessing finance at 10%, 12% or 14% APR, which is not sustainable in terms of delivering viable housing. Access to skilled workers has been raised many times. We have to do more to look at the work permit scheme and try to offer people who have proven skills access into the country and fast-tracked citizenship. Beyond that, we need guarantees to affordability. That is one of the problems builders will have. At least if builders take on a social scheme, they know there is a buyer at the end, namely, the Government. They do not know that is the case if they were to build privately, and that is a significant constraint.

There has been a lot of talk in this House recently about value for money. I want to raise the treatment of void properties in so many local authorities around the country. Some of them have been out of service for six to 12 months. The average time to turn them around can be a minimum of six months, and the average cost is between €36,000 and €40,000. Does it make sense to go into a perfectly good house, pull out all the cabinets and white goods and give contracts to people to come in and put all of the equipment back in, all at a cost to the State? Two years later, if that house becomes void again, the same process is repeated. Nobody in the private sector who has to earn their money would put up with that messing. They would not decide to go into a house and root out everything. Getting it for free is the problem. The Government needs to talk to the local authorities and ask them why. I have seen houses that are perfectly habitable, where everything in them had to taken out and dumped. It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

In terms of the maintenance of the housing stock, is the Minister of State aware that, last year, the Government gave €85 million to local authorities to manage the national housing stock? At an average of €36,000 per property, that would cover approximately 2,400 properties. In this year's budget, I think the Government has given something in the order of €90 million. At the same average of €36,000, this figure would cover approximately 2,500 properties. The actual number in the social housing stock of this country, if it can be counted, is somewhere between 130,000 and 150,000 units. We are building up a problem. The same is true in terms of the housing bodies. The housing bodies have to pay for the maintenance of their own houses. Yet, they suffer around the country from differential schemes. We have no harmonised differential rent policy in the country. That needs to be looked at. Two people in the same scheme living side by side are paying two completely different rents. That is certainly not fair.

The issue of downsizing is something I came across in my own region recently. A lady had a four-bedroom house. Her husband had died and her children had moved away. She wanted to build a house on her land and was told she was not allowed because she did not meet the housing need as she owned a house already. A family was waiting to move into her house. That is the kind of policy dysfunction we are standing over.

Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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I smile to myself when I hear many of the things that have been repeated over and over - I am sure the Cathaoirleach Gníomhach does likewise - with regard to the obstacles facing people who are in need of homes. These people have various income levels. We have listened to people rightly say that on the one hand there are people whose income is too high to qualify for local authority housing and too low to qualify for a mortgage. They are certainly encouraged or even forced to rent, in many cases from funds that are in the market and come between the potential tenant or first-time buyer and the seller of the property in order to provide property that they, in turn, will rent to people who have no other way or means of being housed.

I want to give an example of the experience some of my councillors and I have had in the last ten or 15 years. We identified developed private sites as a way of ensuring that houses were made available within the prescribed income limits at the right price. We discovered, in the first instance, that we had to compete with the AHBs, which were able to purchase a private site for €1 each. That still applies, I understand. We, on the other hand, formed a co-op and arranged for the loans in each case to be dealt with by the local authority or bank depending on what was the most appropriate. When they were approved, we then had to include the cost of the site, which for us was €25,000 per site versus €1.

We got a price from a good builder who did the job. At the end of the day, we were able to bring in 96 houses priced between €140,000 and €160,000. Admittedly this was ten or more years ago but it was a massive difference between that and the houses that were already for sale. When the keys were eventually handed over, the potential market price was €410,000 on average across the board. It was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was possible to provide houses at a competitive price within the market and having regard to the market and ensure that a group of people was protected in some way to enable them to compete in the marketplace. It should also be noted that when the crash came - it came very quickly, for different reasons - not one of those houses went into negative equity. The one thing they had in common was that none of them ever went into negative equity. The price they came in at was at least 35% to 40% lower than the price at which the local authority was able to provide houses at affordable rates. It proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it could be done and it was done.

Some of the bureaucratic nonsense that went on with the shared ownership loans was removed. The shared ownership scheme was a good idea. It gave people a chance to get on the housing ladder at an earlier stage. Everything was fine until somebody in their wisdom decided that it would be necessary to increase the rental part of the purchase price on an annual basis to the extent that it could increase by 40% over an eight- to ten-year period. This was to discourage people and squeeze them out of that market. Many people were squeezed out of their houses and the houses had to be repossessed. The scheme had been a good one in the beginning but it was tampered with. There were lots of people who found themselves in that income bracket through no fault of their own and it enabled them to get on the ladder and get a house that was and still is permanent. Funnily enough, very few houses in that scheme have fallen into the market since then.

The Department introduced something else, namely, the clawback. This involved subsidised private sites, as they were called at the time. A condition was imposed to the effect that a clawback was to apply in the usual way. We know how it works. Why was it necessary to penalise a group of people who had tried valiantly to compete in the marketplace and provide themselves with a home at no cost to anybody else? They all got mortgages. At the time, people suggested that this should not be happening because the people were getting free houses. They were not getting any free houses. They got their mortgages in the normal way as people did over the years through the local authorities and the banks.

An applicant for a council loan has to have a refusal from a bank or a building society - possibly one or two refusals - to be considered. A housing authority is not a bank. It has a responsibility to house the people in its administrative area by two means - through the allocation of a local authority house, or through the allocation of a loan to enable that person or family to get a house for themselves by way of that particular loan. Thousands of people have been facilitated in that way over the years but it has become more restrictive simply because it is more beneficial to funds - some of us would call them "vulture funds" - to zoom in on the market, grab up completed developments and then decide to sell or let them. This is crazy. Nobody believes this is the right way to go about it and it is not. Please abolish the bureaucracy. I agree fully with the previous speaker's comment about reducing the number of pages.

Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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As my colleagues have said, Sinn Féin has no issue and neither does the AHB sector with the proposed changes to the registration regime. While we are not opposed to the operation of cost rental, we do not believe the changes go far enough. We have some concerns, which we will deal with.

I raised the issue of housing adaptation grants with the Minister of State in the past while. We welcome the fact that the maximum housing adaptation grant for older people and those with a disability has gone from €30,000 to €40,000 while there has been an increase in thresholds. There has been an increase in housing aid for older people, which has gone from €8,000 to €10,700. The mobility aid grant has gone from €6,000 to €8,000. This was necessary. Nobody would say it was not. It was beyond time it was done. However, we also recognise that the review process takes far too long. In particular, that kind of money will still not be able to deliver for those families dealing with children with mobility issues who are getting older. We have all dealt with issues like that so we need a conversation between the Department and the HSE to deal with some of these bespoke solutions. This is welcome. We just need it to happen as soon as possible. I am aware of issues facing some families where this will not cut the mustard. If you had 20 minutes, you could spend the entirety of them talking about disabilities and housing. Whatever work has been done, there is a lot more to do.

Many have spoken about Irish Water and capacity issues. I could speak about brown water in Dundalk and the need to see the pilot scheme. We know there are particular issues in getting rid of surface water. I do not necessarily believe the capacity in the system exists. Heavy rain could mean disaster for areas like Dundalk. There are wider issues. I believe I will be coming back in here within the next while to talk about how it is affecting a significant number of possible builds and planning permissions. This is a significant issue relating to Irish Water and capacity.

I have been over and back with the Minister about Cois Farraige and affordable housing. I said previously that Cois Farraige offered an affordable house at €305,000 in Dundalk. I do not accept that this is affordable. Only five out of the ten offerings were taken up. There has been an over and back. There is an issue regarding criteria and the Minister accepted that there are timing issues. All this needs to be looked at.

We all know the issues ranging from not enough council houses to not enough cost rental and we know rents are through the roof. Until something is done, we will be dealing with a significant number of people in dreadful situations. We can talk about housing and homelessness but we are nowhere near a solution.

Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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The Minister of State is a new Aire Stáit and I wish him well but something needs to be done. This is papering over the cracks. It is more of the same. I am not pointing at the gentlemen and ladies here - the officials - but the game is lost. The game with regard to housing is badly lost. Maybe the Minister of State is used to losing so he should not shake his head. I did not want to say that - that is why I started - but the game is lost. The Government has fundamentally lost its way. Since Fine Gael came into government in 2011 or 2012, we have had more reports and more Ministers for housing than I have had hot dinners. Deputy Bacik, who wants a second bike shed built after the cost of the first one, was going to build 1 million houses. The parties in Government, including Fianna Fáil, have lost it.

A group of people in my own village, An Caisleán Nua, got together after a terrible break in and the violent assault of a gentleman back in 1995. We got together and formed a voluntary housing association. We spoke to iar Theatha, Dr. Jerry Cowley, a good Mayo man. We built 17 houses in a short time, under budget and ahead of time. I mention the inability of councils to deliver big projects and the folly of talking about a public company to build houses, which will be another monster like Irish Water. It was the biggest monster that could ever have been created and it is the biggest block to any house being built in any village or hamlet because Irish Water has no sign of an investment plan. In my own village, we have raw sewage pumping into the river. It is ignored by the EPA which is a flawed, failed organisation because it will not tell the truth. It cannot tell the truth. Its wages are paid by the Government, so it is disgracefully vindictive against farmers and does not expose what it should, namely, the pollution by local authorities. My village was on a scheme and we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Now we are not even on a scheme. There are hundreds, or I would say thousands, of villages around the country. I could bring the Minister of State to 30 villages where Irish Water will not allow a block to be put on a block because the capacity of what it calls a plant but what is it? It is a septic tank that you would put in an ordinary bungalow, catering for 350 houses. It is an insult to the word "plant" to call it that because it is not plants. It is a shocking situation. The Government has lost its way completely and the permanent government has lost its way too. Secretaries General are not held accountable at all. They do not answer to the people here. The Government has fundamentally and totally lost its way.

We will not get in the private builders until such time as a government is elected here that knows its way, and it is not being offered by the Opposition either. We need the private builders and the small- and medium-sized builders badly. We demonise them here every day of the week. I know a man in Cahir who is a wonderful builder. Irish Water is charging him telephone numbers to make a connection of 100 m to the sewerage scheme. It is daylight robbery. He has the initiative and enthusiasm. He is building 30 houses at the moment. He put his hand in his pocket and got a loan from the bank. He has the courage to do it and he is doing it. He has done schemes. He knows how to build, how to deal with the surveys, how to deal with subbies and how to pay his way, his taxes and his employees' taxes but Irish Water is holding him up and is trying to extort money. The money it is trying to get from him is extortion. The Government has lost its way completely. It is time it folded up its tent and took off.

Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent)
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We have been talking about housing since I came into the Dáil and it has not got any better. It has got worse under the Government’s leadership. Instead of a clear light going forward it is more difficult. Talking about young people, especially in my own constituency, rural planning is savage. It is a horrible issue for a lot of young people. The disappointment, hurt and money they have spent on not getting planning permission fills my clinics every weekend. These are people with very difficult stories who have spent a lot of money. They are honest-to-God people who have been turned down just because of the book that is there to make sure people do not get planning no matter which way they twist or turn. One man came to me after his daughter was turned down after spending €10,000. I asked him why he did not come to me before she was turned down. He told me that he thought after spending €10,000 of honest money and giving honest reports as was asked the girl would get planning but she did not. That shows how bad things are in my constituency of Cork South-West.

The situation is a crisis but the Government has not looked at it and it has done nothing about infrastructure in this country. We saw that this weekend in Bantry with the flooding of homes and businesses. No money was spent on the flood scheme. Go back four years and two months ago. I stood in the very same spot as I did last Sunday when the Minister of State with responsibility for the OPW, Deputy O’Donnell, came down. He promised the earth, moon and stars again as did the former Minister of State, Deputy O’Donovan, four years and two months ago. It was the same as the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, promised four years and two months ago. They lied to and misled the people of Bantry. Good God, there was like an army of Fine Gael around the politicians the last day. I will not call them what they call it - a "dirty word"-show of Fine Gael people going around. I will always welcome the Minister of State here or anybody else to west Cork as a Minister but we want delivery. I wanted a date from the Minister of State, Deputy O’Donnell, for when exactly the first bucket would be dropped into the ground for the Bantry flood scheme and when the last bucket would come off the ground but he could not give me that answer. The then Minister of State, Deputy Patrick O’Donovan, came down and made a promise four years and two months ago and the then Minister, Michael McGrath, did the same. They throw them a little fork of money and head off out of town. It is like John Wayne, heading into town with their guns all blazing and then heading out of town again but nothing happens. The town gets flooded once again. It is an absolute disgrace.

The farmers have been hit here too. Nobody thinks of the farmer with the end of his ground washed away and roadways washed away at their farms around Bantry. It is an absolute disaster and the Government has done nothing. It could have done something with the compensation scheme. The Minister, Deputy Humphreys, said that she thought there were objections. There are no objections; it is just that we have had a sleeping Government. That is all we have had. The Government could have done a rates waiver. The rates waiver would have stood until the Government had done its job right but it would not dare do that because it would never do the job right. That is why the people of Bantry and its surrounds should reject the Government flatly when the day comes and the Government members come knocking on the door, begging them for votes and telling them all the things it has done for them. Shame on Fine Gael, the Greens and Fianna Fáil for non-delivery for the people.

Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent)
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When will the discrimination stop for the counties that have been promised delivery of sewerage and water systems for decades? I have said this before and I will say it again. Forty years ago, the Government promised a Fianna Fáil councillor in Askeaton that they would have a sewerage system. Now look at Glin, Abbeyfeale, Oola and Dromcollogher. Two thirds of Limerick county has been starved of funding that has been promised for decades by the same Governments. I am not talking four years and two months ago when the then Minister of State, Deputy Patrick O’Donovan, promised it to my colleague, Deputy Collins. I am talking about 40 years ago. Every time, come election time, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael fool the people of County Limerick, telling them, “We're going to do it for you this time, lads.”

It goes back to a form of madness of voting for the same people over and over and expecting a different result. That is a sign of madness. The people of Limerick have had 40 years of promises that I know about and everything in between. Every election comes around and they vote for the same people again. The only difference is that RTÉ was the only television station we had back then but there are a lot of different media outlets now. We now have social media which catches them out every time they vote against their own county every time they come up here. They are telling them one thing on our local radio and then they come up and they vote with the Government against their own communities. Yet we still have got no money for infrastructure.

Following the last general election, only for the one Minister elected from Kerry, there would have been no Minister on the west coast in Ireland. What is wrong? What is wrong with this Government is the Cabinet. It is made up of teachers, doctors, solicitors and accountants. There are no business people, no community people and no country people. The balance is wrong. It is like baking a cake. If you do not have all the ingredients, you cannot bake it. Well, the Cabinet is a sour taste in everyone’s mouth because the ingredients are wrong.

The Government brought in a quota for elections to put forward so many females for election. I agree with that but it should also bring in a quota so that the Cabinet would reflect the country in the Ministers who are appointed. They cannot all be above in Dublin or based in Cork. They have to be spread throughout the country to make sure the country is represented and not only one sector. That is why there has been nothing built in the country for years. It is because the Cabinet is wrong. That means the team is wrong. That means the hurling match with all forwards and no backs; or all backs and no forwards. You cannot bake a cake with only a few ingredients and this Government has left a sour taste and the people of Ireland and the people in Limerick need to stand up this time and send a clear message to the Government. It is time to get it out and make sure there is proper data and that the country will now be represented.

Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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In discussing this very important issue, I want to highlight something on behalf of the people of Kerry. This is the loss of the single rural cottages. It has been so long that a lot of politicians might not even remember what that was.

A farmer - man or woman - would give half an acre to the local authority and the authority could build a house that would serve that family for generations. They are very difficult to get now, as are affordable homes. I am a supporter of approved housing bodies but, in places like Killarney, Killorglin, Kenmare, Cahersiveen, Listowel and Dingle, we might have houses like that being built but no affordable houses are being built for people who are working and want to get a mortgage, buy the house and pay off the mortgage over their working life. They cannot do that because those houses are not available. That is a big problem in County Kerry for working people who want to pay for their own houses but cannot buy them.

One reason they cannot buy them is small builders are gone. We had highly respectable men and women; many are gone to their maker. Lovely people like John Joe Gleeson, who was a local builder in Kilgarvan, and plenty of others come to my mind. They were not big builders but always built a few houses, sold them, did great work and provided a service to the community. They are gone because they have been hunted out of business by this Government and previous Governments.

With regard to TII, look at what is happening when it comes to planning permission. I am talking about the Ring of Kerry road, for example, leaving Killorglin and going through Cahersiveen, Waterville, Castlecove, Caherdaniel and Sneem. All along the Ring of Kerry, you cannot get planning permission. Why not? Because TII will object. Why will it? It says you cannot make an entrance or you would be putting road users in danger. The killing thing is the boys and girls who want to build those houses are living on the Ring of Kerry road anyway. They live in their parents' houses. They have cars and want to get their own set-up. They will not create one extra vehicle movement on the road because they are doing it anyway. They are entitled to do it because the Government cannot stop them. If it could, it would, but thanks be to God it does not have that power yet.

The Minister of State knows there are people in An Taisce and the Green Party who have made a career out of objecting to other people because they think the countryside is a big nature park for people to come from the city to look at. They do not want us destroying it by having our sons, daughters or grandchildren living there. Unfortunately, I have a message for the Green Party, card-carrying An Taisce members and the people in An Bord Pleanála: we will do our best to ensure we continue to have life in rural Ireland. We will keep the lights on. We are the people who are important because we have kept it going so far and will keep it going in spite of Government policies, objectors and people who want to keep it as a nature reserve and who know everything about every species except the human species.

Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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The tenant purchase scheme was a great scheme. People got their feet under them and went down the road of purchasing their own home, and the money went back into the coffers and built more houses. Now councils have stopped that; any house built after 2015, they will not even sell it. We were so proud when people used to get rural cottages. It was the same story - when they got their legs under them, they bought them out and the money went back to the State. We have so many schemes now, like the mortgage-to-rent scheme, and approved housing bodies are building houses. Grand, we welcome them but there is no place for people who want to build or buy a house for themselves. They cannot get planning in any town.

Many towns have no sewerage schemes. There are 38 settlements without proper treatment plants - some with none - in Kerry. I do not blame Irish Water. Where is it to get money if the Government does not provide it? It will meet no leprechaun and it needs the money to further our settlements and water schemes, but it is not happening.

Small builders cannot and will not survive because they now have to carry the full cost of the house until it is finished and ready for the key to turn in the door. They cannot carry it and the banks will not support them or give them the loans to do that.

I have been asking for a long time, and the Tánaiste frowned at me when I asked it, that an allowance be given to our own people on the housing list and want to rent a house. They cannot get a council house or whatever. If you are a Ukrainian person, your house will be paid for by the State and €850 will be given to the landlord tax-free. I am not asking for it to be taken off them; I am asking for it to be given to our own people who have been on the list for so long and have no hope. Many people cannot get houses and if they are homeless, they will not be put into hotels. We do not even have a homeless centre in Killarney town; they have to go to Tralee. Children are rooted up out of their schools. That is not fair.

There are so many other things that I could talk for two hours without stopping about what is wrong with the housing situation. The Government is not making any headway.

Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly, Independent)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I have raised the issues relating to approved housing bodies on the floor of this House a number of times. I have engaged with the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority in the past few weeks on its efforts to monitor compliance with approved standards. I acknowledge the very constructive and open response I received from the communications lead within the authority. I was particularly glad to see that, with respect to monitoring compliance with approved standards, the authority has taken significant steps to ensure approved housing bodies comply with the standards approved in February 2022 and this includes an annual monitoring programme.

I understand there are currently 441 approved housing bodies registered in this State. This returns me to a point I have been raising consistently with respect to the sheer volume of approved housing bodies and the staggering costs allocated to them. A reply from the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to a parliamentary question of mine revealed that in 2020 and 2021, his Department provided €514 million and €624 million, respectively, to local authorities in respect of a range of approved housing bodies funded schemes.

We know some of the housing bodies are carrying massive levels of debt. For example, Dr. Matt Treacy has pointed out that Clúid's 2022 financial statements show that it has €1.9 billion in assets, €1.7 billion in liabilities and only €38 million in cash and bank. He asks whether approved housing bodies can sustain these levels of debt. I want to repeat that question today. It is critical we know the answer.

I say this particularly in the context of my constituency of Laois-Offaly, where so many approved housing bodies are playing a role. This is important because the recent analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office on the number of households eligible for, but not yet in receipt of, social housing has estimated the combined cost of unmet housing needs in Offaly and Laois is €742.5 million. The cost for the Offaly County Council lists overall was put at €338 million, while for Laois County Council the cost is €404 million. It is critical that we have an approved housing body sector that is financially viable, fit for purpose, completely transparent and, most importantly, one that delivers for people, and not just for the organisations receiving vast sums of taxpayers' money.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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We go to the Independent Group. Deputy Pringle is sharing with Deputy Connolly.

Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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I thank the Ceann Comhairle for the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I would like to voice my opposition to how this legislation has been introduced and progressed through the House. We were told just last week we would take Second Stage today and proceed through Committee and Remaining Stages tomorrow.

Our legislative process was not designed to be rushed through in this way. All Stages should be given their own slot and ample time for scrutiny in the Dáil and Seanad. TDs were also only made aware this would be the case after the amendment deadline had passed, which was completely unacceptable. This was raised by me and others at the Business Committee last week. How are we supposed to do our jobs as legislators when this Government refuses to engage in the democratic process? I have raised this issue many times during this Government’s term, but it is clear it has no care for or interest in the legislative process. If the shoe was on the other foot, I have no doubt Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Green Party TDs would be expressing the exact same concerns from the Opposition benches. Opposition input into and scrutiny of legislation that will have an impact on so many in our country is vitally important and time should be made to allow this.

There is no doubt the lack of housing is the biggest issue we face at the moment and one that affects every single person in some way. In particular, there is a severe shortage of affordable housing. Last week I raised the fact that in Donegal, prices in the third quarter of 2024 were 12% higher than the previous year and that the average price of a home in Donegal is now a massive 65% above the level seen at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. This week the Myhome.ie property price report has shown property prices in counties Sligo, Leitrim and Donegal continue to rise, with prices in Donegal increasing by over €15,000. In a survey from the Real Estate Alliance published two weeks ago, Donegal saw the highest increase of the three north-western counties, with the average price of three-bedroom semi-detached houses increasing by 3% in the past three months alone, from €165,000 to €170,000.

Despite what the Government claims, it is clear things will only get worse as prices continue to rise and the Government refuses to do anything about it. This legislation to remove the requirement for approved housing bodies to apply for registration and to be permanently registered certainly is not going to address the problem either. We should not be forced to rely on approved housing bodies to provide much-needed public housing. The fact there are 441 approved housing bodies operating in the country at the minute shows it just does not make any sense. Our local councils should be given the funding and support necessary to ensure those in need of housing are able to secure housing, no matter their income. There is no doubt the public housing income level threshold is far too low, especially in Donegal where people have to be making below €30,000 to be considered for public housing. This is ridiculously low and it does not make sense that this has not increased along with the minimum wage, except that the Government wants to manage the housing lists to keep them as low as possible to make it look like it is actually doing something.

Everyone, no matter their income, should be entitled to public housing if they have a housing need. Everyone should have access to a roof over their head. It is the most basic human need, but families on the minimum wage should have access to it in particular given the lack of affordable housing available. This is what this Government should be focusing on as well as ensuring councils are being funded to provide sufficient housing, rather than just supporting voluntary housing bodies.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill, which has three Parts and 16 sections. I will reiterate what my colleague has said. It is completely unacceptable there was no pre-legislative scrutiny, notwithstanding that the largest Opposition party agreed with that. It was absolutely essential to have pre-legislative scrutiny. There was also no regulatory impact analysis published. Whether one was done or not I do not know. Neither were the heads of the Bill published. I see the urgency to this in relation to one aspect, namely, the registration. I have no problem with that, but this Bill is doing a lot more than that. Some of it is good and I have not had the time to examine my concerns about other aspects.

I speak as a person who spent 17 years at local level and watched a housing crisis being manufactured day after day from 2009. No public houses were built in Galway from 2009. I cannot say that often enough. Over the years we have seen what has happened with the approved housing bodies. They do great work. Am I happy with the number that are there or the regulation? I am not. The reason I am not happy with it is we see the fragmented nature of our public housing provision, which is split on every level, rather than the Government, through the local authorities, having the main authority, money, resources and power to provide it. I see that as the best way to tackle the housing crisis. It is one of the aspects. Over the years the local authorities did a very good job. However, they were starved of funding, starved of leadership and forced by government policy to rely on the market from 2014 and onwards when we brought in the housing assistance payment. The exact words used in Galway city were that it was the only game in town and we were to forget everything else. Between that and two more schemes I understand we are approaching €1 billion per year straight into the market, and we wonder why prices are going high. On top of that we have the whole other jigsaw of schemes, including the help-to-buy scheme, which has been deplored on every level by various organisations, but which the Government, in its wisdom, sees fit to keep going. Every single scheme has been designed to keep the price of houses artificially high to the point that with the help-to-buy scheme we are giving help to consultants. They do a great job and deserve a good salary, but it really is an indictment of our housing policy when we need to help consultants buy a house and that is what we are doing with that scheme.

As the approved housing bodies area was unregulated we set up the regulatory authority by legislation in 2019. I was on the public accounts committee at that time and was really aghast at the number of housing bodies, approved or otherwise, that had fitted into the gap to provide essential services. Housing is just one such service, with another being care. Imagine these bodies had to fit into that gap, described as charities or approved housing bodies, and were unregulated until this came along. The regulator has been functioning for two years now and I have taken the trouble of looking at its sectoral analysis. The figures on what we have done with housing are absolutely frightening. Some 58,184 dwellings are now owned by approved housing bodies. When this regulator asked them to register, it got a 96% response, which it thought was very good. It was a 96% response to answer questions.

The regulator points out a small percentage of the housing bodies - a total of nine such bodies, presumably including the Peter McVerry Trust - are responsible for or have 68% of the housing stock. The regulator points to the huge risk involved in having such a concentration in such a small number. Nowhere is that reflected or analysed in the Minister’s speech. I really do not expect Ministers to know everything - that is why we have pre-legislative scrutiny and committees. Those Members who agreed to waive scrutiny left us in a dilemma because we have nothing. We have nothing to examine. I have not had the benefit of briefings. Officials are very good at giving briefings, but we have not had any, nor any analysis or any way we can think as to what is happening with the further fragmentation of our housing policy. We are here to bring in emergency legislation, in part. I have no problem with that, but I echo what Deputy Boyd Barrett said. I am of fairly average intelligence. I can read and tease things out, but I am having a little difficulty understanding some of it. I should not have that difficulty because I always say my job is to explain it to my constituents and reassure them something is being done about housing. That job is becoming increasingly difficult. We have a concentration, and then a response by 96% of approved housing bodies.

We can look at the Peter McVerry Trust, which has not been mentioned at all. Obviously, at some stage the trust did great work and still does, but there are serious questions about governance. We thank the Comptroller and Auditor General and his office for producing that chapter. I do not know whether the Minister of State has read it. I read it quickly a few months ago. I read it more slowly on this occasion and it really is something. It is an exposé of the failure by the Department and the trust itself to monitor what was going on. The words “robust” and “strong mechanisms” are used. Governance did not exist. I will put this in perspective because this is one of the approved housing bodies the Government utterly relied on for the provision of homeless services. It has 2,000 clients and 71 locations, one of which is in Galway and has closed. I have no idea what is happening with it. The trust also has approximately 600 housing first tenancies. The chapter states “The Trust is the largest non-governmental organisation (NGO) provider of homeless emergency accommodation in the State”. That is something that should be done directly by the local authorities. What do we get out of this? The Minister of State should read this. He should read about the amount of money just this aspect of this approved housing body that deals with homelessness has cost us.

In less than five years, from 2019 to 2022, in excess of €140 million was spent. There is the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive, the Department and the trust. In November 2022 the Government approved exceptional funding of €15 million to this trust. That was on top of millions of euro given without the prior approval of the Department of public expenditure and reform.

I am not really here to give out about that but to look at what it takes to regulate any body in Ireland. We never, ever seem to learn and yet we are going down the road more and more of the fragmentation of the provision of what should be a basic human right provided by local authorities and with hands-on leadership from the Government in rolling those out. However, that is not what is happening.

This is just one example where we have completely commodified homelessness and put it out to this organisation. A sum of €15 million was given with no clear criteria or conditions as to how that money was to be used or how it could be clawed back if it was not used properly. This is from a report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, who is not given to exaggeration. I have never known a man as well as his staff to be more moderate when they write their reports. This examination was undertaken to provide a review of the Department's oversight arrangement in respect of funding provided to the trust. The report found fault with the factors giving rise for the need for exceptional funding, and the Department's monitoring of those conditions, and then it gave some of the background. I will skip all of that because I really want to get to what happened here.

During 2022, the Department conducted spot checks on 18 homeless service providers and one of them was the Peter McVerry Trust. The Department sought invoices during 2022 and was told there were no invoices available for the first quarter of 2022 but to come back again in quarters 2, 3 and 4 and invoices would be available then. The Department did not go back and there were no more spot checks conducted by the Department. There was no documented procedure for spot checks, as that is one of the report's recommendations later on. Imagine that we need the Comptroller and Auditor General to tell us all of this.

There were various advances to the trust but no record of approval of those advances. The protocol is that there should be approval for advances by the Department.

In September 2022, concerns had been raised with the Department by the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive. I will come back to this, because the regulatory authority does not seem to have picked this up. I am not laying blame on a regulatory authority but one would think, naively, that if we have a regulatory authority, it would pick up on something and that if it is not picking it up, why not, what do we need to change and what resources do we need to put in? This was picked up bit by bit by the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive.

A CEO retired and another CEO came in for a little while. It seemed he was so concerned that he departed after not too long in the job. What happened then was the Department recommended a former county manager to come forward and act as an interim CEO of the trust. Does the Minister of State know what he is paid per day for an interim job? It is €1,000. Following the resignation of the CEO on 11 October 2023, after only five months in the role - he or she obviously saw sense - the trust requested advice from the Department regarding a temporary replacement. The Department suggested a former chief executive of a county council as a potential candidate to provide short-term assistance to the trust. The trust engaged the recommended candidate who commenced on 16 October at a daily rate of €1,000. This was recouped, of course, from Dublin City Council which then recouped it from the Department and so on. I am highlighting all of this so we can see the money, and I will now examine the reports.

There are two reviews. The trust notified the Charities Regulator and the Approved Housing Bodies Regulator in July 2023, just over a year ago. It was a requirement. Both regulators have since launched investigations, so there are two investigations under way. On top of those two investigations, there are two reviews under way, one of which is by the County and City Management Association. There is the strategic review by the Department itself and an audit process commenced in 2024.

All of this has cost millions of euro and we have not housed anyone yet. We are waiting for the fifth review and report all to do with one trust. Then we find out that as of September 2024 the Department has not made any material changes to the protocol agreement. It was the inadequacy of the protocol agreement and monitoring arrangements that led to all of this in the first place.

The Peter McVerry Trust is one of the main providers of homeless services and the report's conclusions state that the controls, spot checks and quarterly reports did not operate properly. The Comptroller and Auditor General report recommends a more formal structure.

I will leave this issue aside, bearing in mind the millions of euro this has cost. A committee has been set up now that is monitoring the trust. The report is really worth reading. This all happened with one trust. Of the approved housing bodies, what was the figure?

Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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It was 441 approved housing bodies.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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Some 441 approved housing bodies came back. More than 441 approved housing bodies exist and we wonder about accountability and the absence of it.

I am talking about all of this in the context of Galway city, which has absolutely no hope to give applicants on the housing waiting list. I am not given to exaggeration. There is absolutely no hope. I have the minutes of the task force. The task force was there since 2019. It was ostensibly set up because we had a crisis. What has happened since is that we have changed the name of it. That is very good. We have a new chair and have slimmed down the membership of it. We now have a housing task force for delivery, which is a very nice change, but we have had no change. There are no affordable houses and the targets are all below. I will not use my words; these are direct quotes from the minutes. It refers to the council struggling for accommodation provision through HAP and RAS, the only game in town. They state there is a huge problem with lack of infrastructure in the city and county and that it is very difficult to deliver balanced development. With regard to social housing delivery, there is Galway's 2024 target, the projected pipeline is 136, and only one has been delivered to date. One would ask what is happening here? A task force should sit for a few months, do a quick analysis, come back again a few weeks later, do another quick analysis and see what is going on. The Simon Community has told us that there are no more properties available under HAP or RAS under any of the discretionary.

I think there is a way out of this. I would hope there would be a change of government. I am not given to saying that from here; I am more given to looking at issues. We need a change of government with an absolute change of policy that recognises the provision of a home as a basic human right. The prices of property and our homes must come down. We have to face that. We have to phase out HAP completely. Obviously, we cannot do it overnight but we cannot keep feeding the market so that prices stay up.

We are looking at legislation today that received absolutely no scrutiny whatsoever, ostensibly to facilitate the falling off a cliff of the registration date. I have no problem supporting that. However, other parts were put into the Bill without proper scrutiny. It is no way to do business and that is only one tiny piece of legislation. God help us tomorrow night with the planning Bill that is going nowhere.

Violet-Anne Wynne (Clare, Independent)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I will just touch on a few points because there is a case I would like to refer to. Regarding the language change and inclusion of "alleviation of housing need" it is important to note such changes are to ensure AHBs are solving the housing crisis.

There are no plans, however, and no mention of how to build and deliver new affordable housing. In County Clare, we have got three affordable housing schemes over the line but we are struggling with the first one that was approved. I believe it was approved for ten and only three have so far got over the line.

I also point to the ineligibility issues around social housing. Incomes have increased, which has ensured some families are over the cut-off and, therefore, ineligible for any support by way of affordable housing. It is becoming such an issue that constituents of mine in County Clare have been on the waiting list for emergency accommodation for three months. There is no sign as to when space will be found for them. The system leaves many people unable to access supports.

I will mention the case of Magdalena, who reached out to me. She explained that an official notice to quit that was issued to her and her family will come into effect on 6 November. They have done everything they can but there is nowhere and no option for them to go to. They are a large family with five children. Her husband's income means they are over the threshold for social housing and any kind of housing assistance support. They do not qualify for a mortgage. The criteria are going against them because there are five children. They have tried every mortgage and property purchase help scheme. They have tried the cost-rental tenant in situscheme but their landlord is unwilling to sell. Here we are looking at this legislation but there is no solution coming forward for such a family. For the rental market, the family is deemed unsavoury because there are so many children and so on. There is also a rare genetic disorder involved and housing adaptations would need to be made. They have seen one private rental property, but when landlords hear all these conditions, they are no longer interested.

Malcolm Noonan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Green Party)
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I thank all the Deputies for their contributions. I will come back on some of the points that have been raised since I took over duty for the debate. Many of the points that have been raised did not relate to the content of the Bill. Deputy Michael Collins raised issues about rural housing, rural planning infrastructure and the Bantry floods. The Government notes the concerns of the communities affected by the floods. The Minister visited the area over the weekend.

Deputy Michael Healy-Rae mentioned single cottages. From a heritage perspective, we have invested through Croí Cónaithe and other schemes to try to support communities and allow them to restore many old traditional cottages. The Heritage Council was in receipt of an award yesterday for some of the work it is doing in that regard. The Deputy mentioned An Taisce and will have the opportunity to have a go at the organisation again tomorrow if he wishes when the Rural Independent Group's Planning and Development (An Taisce) Bill is before the House. I note that the work has been done. There has been investment in rural Ireland, including through public transport and agricultural schemes to support rural communities. I dispute what the Deputy said.

Deputy Nolan raised issues with the regulatory authority. I welcome her comments about monitoring progress.

Deputy Pringle raised issues with AHBs. They are an important part of our housing delivery network. They are highly valued and provide accommodation and support to maintain tenancies across the country. They are an important part of the housing delivery ecosystem.

Deputy Connolly raised a number of points about Galway and the Peter McVerry Trust. I will not make any response to the latter point, which is a separate matter that could be discussed at a committee meeting or elsewhere. She also raised the issue of the delivery of housing in Galway, which she has raised on a number of occasions.

I take on board the points raised by Deputy Wynne in connection with County Clare. If there are matters the Deputy wishes to bring to the attention of the Department, specifically around ineligibility, I ask her to do so. I note that there is flexibility around the income thresholds, as far as I am aware. I note the points she made.

The two elements of this miscellaneous Bill, though they do very different things, both contribute in their own way to the Government's overall strategy under Housing for All, of which the work of AHBs forms a critical element. The amendments to the Housing (Regulation of Approved Housing Bodies) Act 2019 aim to achieve three policy objectives. The first is to permanently register all deemed registered AHBs. This will ensure existing AHBs will remain within the regulatory environment and remove the need to make constitutional changes, which would have required significant restructuring in the sector, adding additional cost and complications at a time when the development of social housing under Housing for All is an absolute priority. The second objective is to amend the definition of the "alleviation of a housing need" to accurately reflect the properties that should fall into regulation and to ensure assets supported by State investment remain regulated into the future. The third objective is to remove references to the required constitutional changes which link these changes to the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority powers. This amendment ensures the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority's powers are linked to the function of an AHB and provision of dwellings for the alleviation of a housing need.

The amendments of the Affordable Housing Act regarding cost rental, just over three years after that legislation was enacted, represent a widening of the scope for Ireland's newest housing sector. It is something we championed in the programme for Government and it is very important. Although cost rental is still at an early stage, valuable lessons have been learned from the practical experience of providing this new form of housing and the numbers speak to the success. Almost 1,800 new homes had been delivered for cost rental by the end of the first quarter of this year. Setting different eligibility criteria for different compositions of households will assist in making a reality of multiple occupancy cost-rental homes, whereby two or more unrelated adults come together to access the benefits of cost rental and share the burden of the overall rent. As Deputies will be aware, this not only makes the necessary cost-covering rent more affordable for each of those sharing tenants but also reflects the reality of how people, especially young people, come together to operate in the wider rental market today. While cost rental will continue to be an invaluable support for accommodating family units, the benefits of cost rental should be accessible to the full range of household types. The detailed arrangements for multiple occupancy tenancies will be implemented through regulations that will be presented to the Oireachtas in due course. I look forward to working closely with cost-rental providers to draw upon their valuable and practical experience when drafting this secondary legislation.

The allocation plans for cost-rental homes will give scope for greater flexibility and efficiency in the sector where this is judged to be appropriate. When cost rental was first launched, in late 2021, the legislation set out a one-size-fits-all approach to tenanting these homes because simplicity was then of primary concern. Now that the sector is up and running, there may be a cause to allow a broader range of tenanting practices for individual projects. For example, cost-rental providers may seek to prioritise those with a link to an area, a previous residence, a place of employment or the place of their children's education. This was not possible under the existing legislation. At the same time, there may be merit in varying the standard tenanting approach to handle the very high numbers of applicants and avoid long delays in filling tenancies.

These allocation plans will always be subject to the approval of the Minister, and the general practices set out in the existing legislation will continue to be the default for the sector. Everyone involved is mindful of the need to avoid needlessly overcomplicating matters, and the legislation does not require that allocation plans are always used or immediately put in place. The take-up of allocation plans by providers may be slow initially but this new legislation gives scope for the cost-rental sector in Ireland to evolve and develop further.

The other enabling amendments for cost rental will provide for the unique case of a tenant in situ, for example, under the Department's current scheme for renters facing the risk of homelessness due to the sale of a property. These provisions allow a tenant in situ to remain in place through the cost-rental designation of a property, dispensing with the advertising of a vacancy in that case while at the same time ensuring, over the long term, all general provisions governing the cost-rental sector will apply as normal.

I thank all Deputies for their engagement on this Bill and look forward to the discussions on Committee Stage.

Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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I understand it is proposed to take Committee Stage in the House tomorrow.