Eoin Ó Broin
Dublin Mid-West · Sinn Féin · Ireland
“It is disappointing that, when several journalists have contacted the Government and the Department looking to confirm on the record that HAP and RAS tenants are not included - we know that they are not - and set out why and if that will be reconsidered, instead of giving a straight answer that, yes, they have been excluded, and explainin…”
“Will it try to remove survivors when they chain themselves to the gates in protest, as they have said they will, or will it finally listen to them and hear their calls for respect, justice and truth? Will it buy the Bessborough site and stop this outrage from happening?”
“According to the latest summary of social housing needs assessments, 61,000 households are on council waiting lists, although we know a large number of them are single people. About 49,000 households at the end of last year were on HAP, while there were about 7,500 private sector RAS recipients of the 14,000.”
“We are setting out five specific sets of circumstances where that would be permissible. Under our scheme, the person moving from Youghal to Clonakilty would have to have a specific reason like taking up a job or education in Clonakilty or accessing long-term medical treatment, etc.”
“First, importantly it would be for both people on the list and people in receipt of social housing support, such as HAP and RAS. It is not just the 61,000 households on our council lists but also the 55,000 or so households in HAP or private sector RAS.”
“Sure. I thank the Minister of State for his reply. My natural disposition as a person is to treat people at face value, but ten years in this House has made a bit of a cynic of me.”
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“It does not have my party’s support at this stage and we will continue to make the case for a planning framework that will meet the social, economic, cultural and environmental needs of our people. This does not and it is on that basis we will be voting against it.”
“There is too much inconsistency across Departments and that needs to change. There is still no adequate attention to the spatial distribution of disadvantage. We asked for it to be mapped in the original NPF but it was not. That has all sorts of implications for ensuring investment helps us tackle disadvantage spatially. Chapter 8 on the all-Ireland dimension is vague and unclear but other colleagues will deal with that. In chapter 9, there is virtually no mention of embodied carbon in the built environment. There is lots of good stuff on energy efficiency but unless we are actually constructing a lower carbon built environment, it is going to be a problem. This is a disappointing document. It repeats many of the mistakes of its predecessor as well as creating new mistakes.”
“While the operation of the HNDA is a matter for the Minister and the Department, if it is not got right, everything that follows, including the targets for social and affordable housing, whenever they are announced, as well as targets for age-friendly accommodation and accommodation for people with disabilities, will be wrong. I am also concerned there is no greater clarity on rural housing, Gaeltacht housing, housing on the islands or age-friendly housing from a planning point of view. We are still awaiting the guidelines. I think the Minister is the fourth Minister I have stood in front of discussing the rural guidelines. My colleague, Deputy McGuinness, will be raising both those and the Gaeltacht planning guidelines. What is in the NPF is too vague. It is too open to interpretation.”
“However, when I met the Department a year and a half ago on this, nobody could tell me, for example, what data went into determining the social and affordable housing targets and what the actual methodology was. It seemed to almost be a mysterious black box where some stuff went in one side but very few people could explain how the numbers came out the other. I suspect if the Minister and I were to sit down with it, we would both struggle to understand where the numbers were derived from. We need to get that tool right.”
“Regarding national policy objective 45 on vacancy and dereliction, which relates to the conversation I just referenced, the crucial thing here is the NPOs, as they are the things that have legal impact, rather than the fluffy text around them. They are too weak and too ill-defined. I bring to the Minister’s attention an ongoing concern I have with national planning objective 57 on the housing needs demand assessment. This is an important tool. If the data going into it is accurate and up to date and the methodology employed is correct, it cannot only tell us the total number of homes we need, but the tenure breakdown of those right down to county level, local electoral area and even below.”
“The problem is if it is poorly defined and, as is currently the case, there are not adequate supports for public and private sector higher density inner urban development residential projects, then we are going to see continued suburban sprawl. The majority of what has been built in Dublin and the GDA over the past few years is on the other side of the M50 where I represent and in north Wicklow as well as east Kildare, Meath and south Louth. I am not arguing against housing there, but very little is actually happening in our inner urban cores in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Waterford and that is a fundamental problem.”
“When we discussed these matters at committee, my colleagues and other Deputies, including Government Deputies, from Cork, Limerick, Sligo and Galway challenged and questioned the rationale of the 50:50 development. It is something that needs to be constantly revisited. I appreciate it represents significant growth in some of those regional cities but I am concerned it is still too Dublin- and greater Dublin area-centric, with all the problems that brings for the city, the greater Dublin area and balanced regional development more generally. I acknowledge there has been a small change with national planning objectives 7 to 10, inclusive, on compact growth, but I am genuinely concerned "compact growth" still is not properly defined and allows outer existing settlement rather than focusing on inner urban genuine compact growth.”
“This is not just a criticism of mine, as senior members of the Housing Commission are publicly on record saying the same. This is an issue that must be revised. There is a big difference between the targets Government set in the housing plan and its objective assessment of need. The latter should tell us what is required in the form of unmet demand and emerging demand. Then it is up to whoever is in government to say how that Government will meet that. The two are not the same but, for political reasons, they have been conflated, fatally undermining this plan. I am also concerned about national planning objectives 2 and 3. I am not convinced that the 50:50 population distribution is balanced regional development.”
“I understand some officials in the Minister’s Department do not agree with that and that is fine, but despite our having asked for the Minister and the Department to publish the methodology upon which their assessment of the deficit in its numbers in front of us today is based, that has yet to be published. We have a structural demand of 44,000 units per year, according to the ESRI, and an estimate of the unmet or pent-up demand that is about half of the Housing Commission’s. That is too low. The figure of an average of 50,000 new homes a year is too low. My reading of the report of the Housing Commission suggests it would need to be at least 60,000 per year. Every year, the Government misses that, the deficit grows and the overall targets need to be raised.”
“The housing targets that then fed into the national planning framework were simply too low. It took the Government far too long to accept what everybody else knew. The Minister is making the same mistake with this. I had a detailed exchange with his planning officials at the committee in November. The census was in 2022. There have been significant changes, as we know from subsequent ESRI migration and population reports. However, there has also been no adequate consideration of the issue of unmet demand. The ESRI report that has informed the planning framework is based on emerging demand, that is, future demand that will come. The only estimate we have of pent-up demand, as the Minister knows, is the Housing Commission’s.”
“We argued during debate on the Planning and Development Bill that there should be more frequent reviews and they should be more timely on foot of the updated data becoming available from the census. Therefore, notwithstanding my concern, there needs to be a more frequent subsequent review to take account of whatever changes may happen in terms of population and migration patterns over the coming years. This is particularly relevant when it comes to the housing needs assessment of the document. In fact, this was one of the strongest criticisms of the last NPF not just from us in the Opposition but also from the building industry, housing organisations and housing policy experts. The 2016 census was out of date by the time Rebuilding Ireland was published.”
“There are things that could have been done to make it better. I will go through some of those and colleagues throughout the course of the debate will refer to others. The first issue I will raise is a concern about the calculations of population growth. The process, as the Minister of State knows, starts with a census. Two years later, the ESRI undertakes an assessment, and then, a year later, we have the review. That means a period of three years passes between the census data and the figures in the document in front of us, and a lot can change during that period. This was one of the fundamental flaws of the national planning framework in 2018. It was based on outdated census data and did not take into account changes between the 2016 census and the 2018 document. I think there is a risk of making the same mistake again.”
“I was very grateful to have had the benefit of at least some exchange with the Department's officials. However, we also had no opportunity to hear the view of sectoral organisations and third parties on the revised draft. Crucially, we had no opportunity to amend or even suggest amendments for consideration by the Government. When we received the revised draft in November, the Department's officials did give us a change-tracked version of it from the original NPF, which was very useful, but when I sought an updated version of that in advance of today, I was told it would not be available until after the vote. That has made it genuinely difficult to know what changes, if any, have been made between the document published in November and the one agreed by Cabinet only a week ago. As a consequence, this document is very weak.”
“The consultation period over the summer last year was too short. We had written to the Department's officials at the time asking for a short extension and that was denied. Notwithstanding the fact that there have been a significant number of submissions, having it over the summer made it difficult for many, ourselves included, to facilitate or participate in that. Of greater concern, however, is that there should have been an enhanced role for the Oireachtas. The document itself should have been brought into committee. There should have been an opportunity for detailed scrutiny, not just in our housing and planning committee but in other committees as well. Instead we got a very brief session several days before the dissolution of the Dáil.”
“I will be sharing time with my colleague, Deputy McGuinness. Statutory planning frameworks are enormously important. They not only set out a clear and legally defined basis for the entire hierarchy of plans, including the regional plans, the city and county development plans and local area plans, but they also provide a long-term strategic framework for investment and delivery of much-needed infrastructure and for housing. Getting it right is crucial and getting it wrong is more than damaging. In order to get the plan right, the process has to be got right. It gives me no pleasure to say that, having been through the previous national planning framework process, I believe the Government has made a number of mistakes in the process, which, unfortunately, is impacting the quality of the plan in front of us.”
“That would go an enormously long way to reassuring water services workers and the wider public that there is no intention of this Government or future governments to privatise what is fundamentally a public service of the highest order and a fundamental human right, and one on which far greater work needs to be done by the Government with far greater levels of investment to meet the needs of communities as set out by the Minister in his opening remarks.”
“There has been some progress but much more needs to be done. Colleagues of the Minister mentioned connection delays, which are not always caused by the utilities but sometimes by builders or third parties. More work needs to happen on that. With regard to the legacy issues of developer-owned infrastructure, my colleague from Donegal is dealing with this regularly. We still have some 600 residential developments built with pre-Celtic Tiger era planning permission wastewater treatment plants. There is no funding certainty for bringing those into active public ownership and we need to address that. There is a final issue for the Minister that is not in the programme for Government. I urge him to consider the value of holding a referendum to enshrine public ownership of our water system in the Constitution.”
“For all of those other counties across the State where residential developers are doing developments of 20, 50 and 80 units, we need a much more structured and statutory-based preplanning process that does not just involve the local authority sections but also the utilities. Again, we have tabled amendments to the planning Bill on that but the Government would not accept them. Those issues need to be taken into account. The taking in charge of group schemes is still too slow and the funding is inadequate. Ultimately, that is on the Government, not Uisce Éireann. So too is addressing the regular and important reports by the Environmental Protection Agency on water quality, and also the continued EU infringement actions for our failure to meet aspects of the urban wastewater treatment directive.”
“That connection with the local authorities for the public but also between the planning authorities and our public housing authorities is vital. Having those colocated has real merit and I would ask the Minister to pursue that matter. The role of the utilities regulator, particularly in the blocking of what it believes is so-called speculative development, is causing a problem for residential supply. I know Uisce Éireann has made suggestions about non-regulated funding. I have talked about the use, for example, of a housing infrastructure services company to get in and resolve those problems without in any way undermining the independence of the regulator. That has to be addressed because it is crucial. Likewise, I do not think preplanning should just be for developments of over 100 units.”
“There is genuine concern among the public about the ability of the State to manage in a transparent and accountable manner such a large capital project. We need the maximum level of transparency and accountability to ensure this is done in the public interest. Our role will be to scrutinise and to hold the Government and Uisce Éireann to account on all of those matters. There is a range of other issues, which I will not have the opportunity to go into in detail today, but I will flag some of them in the couple of minutes of speaking time I have left before I cede to my colleagues. With respect to the completion of the single utility, it is important that there continues to be some footprint within our local authorities, even if the staff are employed by Uisce Éireann.”
“We have legitimate concerns which we have raised with Uisce Éireann and the Minister's predecessor and I will raise them here again today. The first is continued and deeper engagement with elected representatives, communities, business and environmental interests as that project rolls out. It would not be acceptable for water to be pumped from one side of the country to the other and for a very large portion of that water to be lost in the distribution system because of leakage. We need to get the Dublin, in particular the Dublin city, leakage rates down to the internationally accepted norm of not more than 20%. Dublin city is currently at 50% and, therefore, there needs to be greater work on that.”
“The greater Dublin drainage project has been in planning for seven years. I know the Minister is not responsible for this because he has just taken over but it was remitted back to the board three years ago, in the summer of 2021. Again, my point is not to criticise the board but the lack of resourcing and of statutory timelines are the underlying problem and they need to be addressed. I know the eastern and midlands water supply project is a very controversial one and it has a long history but Sinn Féin fully accepts the need for Dublin city and the greater Dublin area to diversify its water sources. That is an argument we accept. We are not opposed to this project in principle and we have taken the position all the way through.”
“On planning, work still needs to be done in this area. First of all, this means acknowledging that underlying critical infrastructure, and water is one of those, should be prioritised within our planning process. It is something we argued for during the passage of the Planning and Development Bill but utilities are not included in that Bill as a specified category. We need more staff for An Bord Pleanála. It is about 30 staff shy of the increased sanction that the Minister's predecessor provided. It will need an additional 50 staff beyond that. We also need more judges - at least three - in the planning and environmental panel of the High Court and to put the practice guidelines of the courts on a statutory basis so that there are timelines for judicial review decisions.”
“It said it needs another €300 million to upgrade water wastewater treatment in those rural areas of populations below 1,000 people. It is important for clarity and for honesty in the debate for the Government to set out very clearly when we are dealing with the NPF discussions on 30 April what its response is. How much of that ask from Uisce Éireann will the Government provide and over what period of time? There is no point in Government backbenchers coming in here over the next five years and complaining about the lack of funding for individual water and wastewater treatment plants if the Government has not provided money for them and has not ensured that they are in the capital programme. Everything cannot be funded, which I accept, but we need honesty in respect of all of these issues.”
“On the issue of capacity, again Jerry Grant made a very important distinction that the capital programme, which Uisce Éireann is currently finishing, was dealing with compliance and with getting our water system up to the standard it should have been at for long periods of time. It was not, however, about increasing capacity. That is the challenge we now have with its new plan and the new national planning framework, NPF. Uisce Éireann has made very clear that it needs something in the region of €2 billion in additional capital above and beyond what had been allocated previously to meet those challenges. It needs €1.7 billion to upgrade water and wastewater treatment in the 48 priority areas to try to meet the target, albeit too low in my view, outlined in the revised NPF document of 300,000 new homes over the next period of time.”
“In addition to Uisce Éireann improving its own engagement, we need to look at the possibility of a change to legislation to create a statutory forum in every local authority for Uisce Éireann to come in and be held accountable by local councillors on matters of local interest. That would greatly improve that information flow. My experience of Uisce Éireann, the chief executive and senior officials, as a lead spokesperson, is very positive but many of my colleagues at local and regional levels often do not find the same quality of information flow. That is something I want to name as a constructive criticism for the utility to address.”
“The debate here and our future engagement at the Oireachtas committee needs to focus on the most important question, which is this: how do we deliver world-class drinking water and wastewater services through a transparent and democratically accountable model of public service that meets the needs of society, the economy and the environment? In that context I welcome today's debate and I will set out views on a number of matters. The first is, and it is important to acknowledge, that many of our colleagues, the Minister's backbenchers and mine, as well as councillors, often complain that the communication flow with Uisce Éireann needs to be improved.”
“Only a matter of weeks ago, Jerry Grant, whom I am sure the Minister knows, and who is the chair of the board of Uisce Éireann and its former chief executive, and is one of the country's leading water service professionals with decades of experience in the public and private sectors, said that our water system was in a "desperate state". He said that this was because of extraordinary complacency and passive indifference around investment in infrastructure. He called for a new approach from Government. His comments need to be listened to and considered.”
“Uisce Éireann is dealing with some significant challenges and we need to be honest about what those are. Some of them are legacy issues such as the chronic underfunding of water services for decades, a history of fragmented management and delivery, controversy arising from a previous Government's attempts to introduce domestic water charges, the commercial nature of the utility and the previous threats of privatisation. Much of that colours the debate we have today. My strong view is that the focus of our debate should be the future of water and wastewater services. For that we have to have a very honest assessment of where we are. The Minister said there has been incredible progress in recent years. Unfortunately, some of the senior figures in Uisce Éireann do not agree with him.”
“Water is a fundamental human right. It is vital for our families, our communities and public health but also for the well-being of society, our economy and, indeed, our environment. It has been our long-held view that the best way to deliver water and wastewater services is through a public service model where water and wastewater is provided on the basis of need and not ability to pay. Of course, water is not free. People pay for it either through general taxation or through commercial water rates. It is important to note that because of the way in which we fund water services, we are unique in the OECD in having zero levels of water poverty in our society. Notwithstanding the challenges I will address, that is something we should be very proud of.”
“One of the reasons we are all so concerned about those tariffs is that the way in which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have managed the economy for decades has left us over-reliant on one economic sector in terms of growth and, particularly, tax revenue. We are more vulnerable to the impact of tariffs, and counter-tariffs if they are got wrong, than many of our competitors. We should debate those issues, but we should also debate this, too. The fact that the Government has taken a decision to oppose the Bill despite the fact that the Minister says it has no intention of introducing such a charge leaves the question open: what has it really got planned? That is why the people do not trust the Government. That is why we were right to table this Bill and the Government was wrong to oppose it.”
“The Minister is right that we have very significant threats but that does not diminish the importance of this issue in the context of a cost-of-living crisis where some of those threats could result in increased cost-of-living pressures. What are the real threats facing our economy and our society? Over the weekend, Davy stockbrokers complained that the impact of failed Government housing policy on our economic competitiveness was a bigger threat than Trump’s tariffs. I am not saying I agree with that but that is what it said. Today, myhome.ie and Bank of Ireland are saying the way in which this Government has pushed house prices to extraordinary highs means we have an additional layer of vulnerability if the tariffs introduced wrongly by Donald Trump have the impact many of us expect.”
“That programme has been in place since 2013. What we called for was in addition to existing programmes. The Minister also failed to mention some of the most important recommendations of chapter 5, those being, changes to planning, building control and greater supports for people who want to retrofit their own homes to have greater water conservation. Almost every one of the substantive recommendations of that report have been ignored by successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Governments. For the Minister to come here and read out a note from his officials to claim otherwise is unacceptable. I will turn to the big threats.”
“The Minister claimed that the Government had recommended the key recommendations of chapter 5 of the report. As somebody who drafted those and argued tooth and nail to get them into the report, I challenge him to say that is not the case. Let me correct the record. The Minister said on the one hand that there was the national leakage programme. That was in place before we made the report. We wanted that to be increased and accelerated. That has not happened. The Minister said the report called for the keeping of the first fix free scheme. That is not what the report says. We want it expanded to include the possibility of doing works within the curtilage of private property where the owners did not have the financial means to do so. He talked about awareness promoting through the funding of An Taisce.”
“The whole debate about a charge was in the context of compliance with the water services directive. There was a view, which we disagreed with, that in order to comply with the directive there had to be some form of charge. It is very telling that nowhere in the very detailed chapter 5, with its recommendations, was there any talk of a charge. This is because the charge for so-called excessive use is not a conservation measure, given that there is no evidence from Irish Water or elsewhere that the 10% of households that have larger-than-average uses of water are wilfully wasting water. In fact, I suspect many of them are pensioners living in very old homes with old water systems who do not have the money to upgrade them or people who bought Celtic tiger-era defective homes with significant leakages.”
“I do not have the luxury of expert drafting but those technical issues could be resolved by way of friendly amendments from the Government on Committee Stage without any problem and we would not object to that. The real issue is that the Minister does not want to remove this provision. I also thought it was very telling that the Minister introduced a new phrase into the debate. Both the Minister and the Minister of State, Deputy O’Donnell, talked about a water conservation charge. That is not what is in the legislation and, as he knows, that is not the language that was in the 2018 report of the committee on the future funding of water services. In fact, the very proposition of a charge for so-called excessive use was not even in the conservation chapter of that report.”
“I am quite used to being dismissed by Members on that side of the House. However, when he uses that language in this important debate, he is also dismissing whether intentionally or otherwise the tens of thousands of people out there who when they read that article in the Irish Independent were genuinely deeply concerned that "oh no, here we go again. The Government is at it". I am not accusing the Minister of dismissing those people but that is what people will hear when he chooses that language. He is right; there are some technical issues with our Bill. I make this point every time I introduce a Private Members' Bill. I do not have a team of civil servants.”
“There is a contradiction at the heart of the Minister's response to the debate. On the one hand, he said that he has no intention of introducing a charge for so-called excessive use but when we gave him the opportunity to demonstrate that by deed and by removing the relevant provisions of the legislation, he refused to do so. Here is the genuine problem. Many people watching this debate will reach the conclusion that the Minister may not have an intention to introduce any form of water charges at this time but he wants to keep his options open and he wants to keep it on the Statute Book. That is the core of the problem. That is why people do not trust the Minister or his Government colleagues on this issue and that is why we have tabled this legislation. He also accused us of wasting time. I do not mind him dismissing us.”
“If that is the case, not just our party but other parties which will speak here this evening, will make very clear through our actions both in this House and on the street that we will continue to campaign against such unjust charges until the prospect of them is buried once and for all.”
“If the Government wants us and the wider public to believe it that it has no intention to introduce this charge, then vote for this Bill. Why? It is because this Bill removes Part 2 from the 2017 Water Services Act which empowers Uisce Éireann to introduce that charge. If it is really the Government's position that it has no plans at this or any other time to introduce such a charge, we ask it to support this Bill and to put the matter to bed once and for all. If it does not, it will confirm among a large section of the public that, in fact, it does not mean what it says and that it will continue to try to introduce this unjust charge by the back door.”
“The Ceann Comhairle is okay. I was a member of that committee and I sat through the sessions. It was clear that rather than deal with the very substantive issues many of us put on the table, like water conservation, education and changes to planning and building control, the Government simply wanted a mechanism to reintroduce domestic metered water charges. It came up with a proposition of so-called excessive use. Thankfully, that was not introduced immediately afterwards but we saw last year Uisce Éireann publish the water services plan, which included the proposed charge for so-called excessive use. As the Minister knows, at the centre of the media controversy was that his first day brief from the officials included that. The purpose of the Bill is very straightforward.”
“We marched, we protested and we campaigned through a long hard campaigning slog and ultimately we defeated the charge. The Right2Water movement, which opposed not just domestic metered water charges but the privatisation of Irish Water and the introduction of water poverty, was a stand-out success for people and people power. People from all walks of life and from all political backgrounds and none, urban and rural, came together and simply said "No". They came together to stop Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in their tracks and in 2016 the issue was definitively decided, and they forced a monumental climbdown by Government. However, despite that success, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, during the confidence and supply arrangement, put together an agreement that sought to introduce water charges through the back door.”
“When reports of the Government planning to reintroduce water charges appeared in the media, the Minister was very quick onto the airwaves to dismiss this suggestion. The problem is that many people simply do not believe him. They do not trust Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on this issue because of hard-learned experience, and I have to say that I agree with them. The Government parties' track record speaks for itself. For over a decade if not for more, the Minister's party along with Fine Gael have worked together hand in glove through repeated attempts to force domestic water charges on people across the State. Of course, thankfully, the people fought back in record numbers. In their hundreds of thousands, people across the South of Ireland protested against water charges.”
“Of course, people know and understand that this is nothing more than a Trojan Horse for what would eventually be widespread domestic water charges for people connected to the public water system. The Minister also knows from his own constituency and elsewhere that people are struggling with soaring costs of living and are being hammered with rip-off bills right across the board. Households are under huge pressure just to afford the basics and it would be totally unacceptable that any section of our society would be hit with more unfair bills. I am absolutely confident that working people will see through any effort to charge them for water. I am confident that they will, if needs be, protest and campaign against water charges with everything they have got.”
“I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." The Bill we put before the Dáil tonight would scrap water charges for good and would prevent this Government and, indeed, any future government from charging workers and families for household water. Recent reports in the newspapers that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were conniving in the background to reimpose water charges by the back door have sounded alarm bells for many people. These alarm bells cannot be ignored. This has not come from nowhere, as the Minister knows, and significant work was done by his predecessors in the last Government, along with the Department and Uisce Éireann. It seems that the preparation work continues to be done to dust off the Government's plan from 2017 for a so-called excessive use charge.”
“There are two urgent actions the Minister needs to take now. He needs to amend the underpinning legislation for the defective blocks scheme to allow people who are getting tenders from their builders to avail of the most up-to-date SCSI costings rather than those that obtained at the time of the grant application. He also needs to get the finger out on emergency fire safety funding to deal with apartments with Celtic tiger-era defects. It is two years and three months since the Cabinet agreed that scheme. It is a year and three months since the scheme opened. As the Minister knows, because he has met the affected families in Parkwest, not a single cent has been spent. We needed an emergency response. That is not what we have got so far from the Minister over the past 11 weeks.”
“The Minister has closed some of that gap but he has not provided clarity on whether he is going to close all of it and significantly increase the funding. When I listened to him on "Morning Ireland", he talked about figures of €3.6 billion and €3.8 billion. He was being deliberately disingenuous. That is not capital spending for social and affordable housing, as the Minister knows from his programme heads. It is the totality of capital spending in his Department for social, affordable and private housing as well as for grants, upgrades and improvements. I want to know the total additional spend for social and affordable housing by programme subhead for this year. Will the Minister publish that information and put the issue to bed once and for all? I strongly support the inclusion of measures relating to defective blocks in this motion.”
“If the Minister provided less funding for this year, after the overhang is gone and even if notices of termination and eviction notices dip slightly, the money will run out before the end of the year and more people will become homeless. I am also very concerned about the Minister's capital funding announcements in respect of social housing. I welcome every extra cent provided by the Government for social and affordable housing. I welcome every additional social or affordable home funded by the State. However, when the Revised Estimates were published in December, there was a €540 million shortfall between capital allocation for social and affordable housing this year and the outturn for last year.”
“In the second case, I received a very distressing email yesterday from a pensioner couple in Cork who are very advanced with their tenant purchase application but who, because refurbishment costs are excluded and their sale was not closed, have been notified by Cork County Council that the application can no longer proceed. A young woman with three children and two elderly pensioners in their 70s are at risk of homelessness as a consequence of the Minister's decision. What is also very concerning is that the funding is going to run out. There are hundreds of pending applications across the State from last year, 70 in my own local authority, over 70 in Dublin city and 100 or more in Limerick city and county.”
“In particular, the removal of refurbishment costs, the two-year rule and the retrospective application of the new rules to many applications pending since last year will mean people who would otherwise have got access to this vital homelessness prevention support will not now get it. I have already been contacted by two households. The first is that of a young woman in Dublin city with three children who cares for her father. Her tenancy with her landlord has been in place for less than two years. She has been told by Dublin City Council that she is no longer eligible.”