Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 19 Sep 2024

Cuirim fáilte rompu freisin. I hope they have a successful and fruitful visit.

We have discussed and debated in the House and at committee meetings in the past four years the challenges that remain in housing. I have not claimed success, as Deputy Boyd Barrett said at the start; absolutely not. What I have done is to clearly record where progress has been made. Last year, we built more new social homes than have been built in 50 years and this year we will build more than that. This year, we will deliver-----

Does Deputy Collins have a problem?

Okay, perhaps she can wait to ask a question and let me answer Deputy Boyd Barrett.

On affordable housing, when this Government came into office no affordable homes were offered at all. The Deputy knows that. Last year, 1,757 housing solutions were delivered on affordable housing. This year the figure will be more than 6,000. I am not claiming success or that we have dealt with every challenge and every issue, absolutely not. Unquestionably, to get to grips with what still remains a massive challenge in housing, we need to increase the supply of social, affordable and private homes.

In Deputy Boyd Barrett's constituency, 597 homes are being delivered on the Shanganagh Castle site, which Deputy Devlin and others know well, by the Land Development Agency, which did not have legislation when we came into government and did not have any capital. The LDA delivered almost 1,000 homes last year and will deliver more than that this year. A flagship estate is being built there.

In my constituency of Dublin Fingal, 1,200 homes are being delivered in Ballymastone, of which 253 are social and 253 are affordable. I could give loads of examples and the Deputy knows about them. Although we are building all those properties, we still have more to do because people enter homelessness and emergency accommodation for a variety of reasons, as the Deputy also outlined. We have to make sure we have a safety net for them and good quality, emergency accommodation from which people can exit more quickly. We are doing that now. In quarter 2 alone, 630 households exited into safe and secure homes. That is why we have to continue to increase the output, especially of social housing. We will meet our target this year and we will meet and exceed the social housing target. As I speak today, we have almost 25,000 social housing units in the pipeline. It is unprecedented, although Deputy Joan Collins and others might disagree with that, it is simply a fact. We are delivering more social homes now than have been delivered in 50 years. Do we need to do more? Yes, of course we do.

That is why we need a planning system that supports the delivery of the homes and infrastructure we need. That is why I expect Deputies on both sides of the House to support the Planning and Development Bill when it comes back to the House for its final Stages, so we can ensure we have an efficient planning system under which someone from Ballina cannot object to a social housing development in Bray and under which we do not have people blocking housing for others and delaying housing. We have planning decisions being made in courts. This affects people and delays housing delivery and the Government is determined to fix the planning system as well. I look forward to receiving the support of all Deputies opposite when this Bill comes before the House for its final Stages at the start of October.

I have been campaigning on the Shanganagh site, which the Minister will open tomorrow, for 18 years. It has taken us 18 years to develop a public site to deliver 600 social and affordable houses. At that rate, we are facing a grim and long housing crisis. By the way, we still do not know what the price of the affordable housing there will be. There will be 200 social houses. There are approximately 5,000 families on the housing list in our area who have been waiting for 15 to 20 years. Many of the people in the cost-rental bracket who have been thrown off the housing list because their income is above the threshold will not qualify for cost-rental schemes because their income is not high enough and they will be left high and dry.

The Minister did not provide an answer about the people I mentioned who are older, sick, vulnerable people. The only thing being offered to those who live in Dún Laoghaire is to go to dormitory or hostel accommodation in Dublin city centre and they will not go.

They are terrified. They are too sick for that. That is why they are sleeping in cars and couch surfing. They need something in their local area.

I was the first Minister since 2011 to increase the social housing income limits.

We increased them all across the country and they remain under review. We need to increase our own stock of social housing. In the four years of this Government, we have been able to do that and to scale up the capacity to deliver. Certainly, there is much more to do. I only used Shanganagh as an example; I could give the Deputy 20 more. He only has to drive around his own constituency, around Dublin or anywhere across the Twenty-six Counties of the Republic to see what developments are happening right now. Cost rental is making a difference, by the way, for lots of people.

I want to answer the Deputy specifically about seniors. He raised a very good point. There are a lot of people who are retired and on a State pension. It is a big focus to ensure we have right-sizing initiatives in place for people and that local authorities are building homes for seniors and our more vulnerable people.

Another challenge is exiting people from insecure housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancies. In the past three years, we have exited 14,000 people from HAP into permanent, safe and secure social homes. We will continue the purchase of homes with the tenant in situ scheme, which has been a success, this year.

Deputy Varadkar said that short of an asteroid hitting the planet, the national children's hospital would be built for €700 million by 2020. Here we are, with €2.2 billion spent, and it is still not built. A total of €300 million has been spent on metro north and not a shovel has been put in the ground. Ventilators costing €22 million that did not work were bought by the Government during the Covid period. It is costing €50,000 a year just to store them. One hundred electric buses bought by Dublin Bus did not move an inch for a year and a half because somebody did not put in a planning application for an electric charger.

There were 107,000 adverse incidents last year in the health service. That is 107,000 accidents that have damaged individuals. In five years, 3,140 people lost their lives in the health service due to adverse incidents. The State has spent €2.5 billion in compensation as a result of adverse incidents in the past ten years. Nobody was held to account. I once asked a civil servant who was in front of the health committee whether, in his whole experience of the Department and the HSE, he had ever known of somebody losing his or her job because of an adverse incident, even up to the loss of life. He said he had never seen it in his time.

Then we had the cyberattack on the HSE, which cost €100 million and will necessitate €650 million of security upgrades. In human costs, thousands of people have lost healthcare treatment and have suffered significantly in those terms. A total of 473 lawsuits are lining up now because of the cyberattack. The investigation that happened subsequently found that the HSE was operating a frail IT system and did not have the resources or the expertise to support it. Interestingly, the National Cyber Security Centre had a budget of €5 million the year the cyberattack happened. To put that in context, the Taoiseach's office spent €15 million on press statements the same year. The National Cyber Security Centre did not have a director or a premises that year. Nobody was ever held to account for that.

In the case of CervicalCheck, the Government promised in this Chamber that no woman would ever have to go to court because of the damage done to her. Currently, 400 women are going to court to achieve justice for what happened to them. Incredibly, 85% of cervical samples are still being sent abroad for checking, with nobody held to account.

Children are going missing from Tusla special emergency accommodation that is not properly regulated. Some of them have been exposed to sexual exploitation. Nobody has ever been held to account.

The Gucci bike shed in front of Leinster House is a microcosm of the L'Oréal attitude of this Government that "We are worth it". Again, where will the accountability be? Lessons will be learned and a report will be published just when everybody else has moved on. When will we see individual responsibility? When will there be a cost for decisions such as this that cost the country so much? Who signed off on the Government bike shed and what rank were they within the OPW?

The Deputy has raised a very important point with regard to accountability and value for money. Thankfully, the State, due to the hard work of the 2.75 million people in employment, is running a budget surplus. We continue to do that. We are investing in significant infrastructural projects and will continue to move forward projects such as metro north, as the Deputy mentioned, which is crucially important for the east coast region and Dublin in particular.

Yesterday, the Ceann Comhairle dealt with how we all feel about the example of really poor management and lack of accountability in regard to the now infamous bike shed on Merrion lawn. We all abhor that. It frustrates and angers people. It angers me, too. Certainly, we need accountability. I served five years as Vice Chairperson of the Committee of Public Accounts. I saw that committee do its job and I see the current committee do its job. It has the function of bringing people in and looking into, and being the watchdog on, expenditure. Every Department, as well as its Minister, Ministers of State and Secretary General, has responsibilities in the management of its budget. I cannot give the Deputy an answer directly in the particular example he raised as to who sanctioned it. I expect to hear that. We should know that. We should also know what process was followed and how in God's name someone thought that to spend €336,000 on a bike rack was something that would be permissible. No one in their right mind would actually think that. I take it as well that it is not just that one instance. It is an example of where people believe, in certain instances, that the hard-earned tax they have paid has been wasted. I believe in this instance it has been.

We need accountability. We have mechanisms within this House. We are all accountable as Teachtaí Dála to our constituents. We go up for election every four or five years and the people will vote for us or they will not. It is a democratic Chamber and a democratic Republic. Within the structures of the Civil Service, where expenditure like this is made and decisions like that are made, there has to be accountability. There is accountability to the House. The Ceann Comhairle has called for that. I expect that the Committee of Public Accounts will be involved and will discuss it. The chairperson of the OPW must be involved. There should be no secret on this. People deserve to know.

Regarding the provision of the children's hospital, it is a crucial piece of infrastructure for our children that will last for decades. There is no question that there has been a less than satisfactory history with regard to some of the expenditure on it but we need that facility. If we look back at how it was established in the first instance, how the contract was broken up led to the problems, including the ground works being done separately. That is my own belief. We need that facility opened. We need our kids to be looked after in a world-class facility, which it will be.

I support the Deputy in his call for accountability. No Deputy in this House would disagree with that.

I will give another couple of examples. The Minister for Justice promised there would be a policing review after the Dublin riots. It does not exist anymore. There are 4,000 empty local authority homes at the moment. It takes eight months for them to be returned to the market. It takes three weeks for a private rental home to be returned to the market. A planning application has not even gone in for the flood defences that were promised in Midleton in 2017. Some €20 million was spent on pointless referendums where Ministers blatantly misled the public. The M50 bridges were built for £53 million. Commuters are still paying billions of euro for those bridges.

The reality is that this Government is an accountability-free zone. We are cursed to wake up to a Groundhog Day of incompetence unless there is change in this regard. Accountability means there is a cost to an individual. We see all the reports and the meetings of the Committee of Public Accounts. However, unless there is a cost to individuals for making decisions that are wrong or where they are not fulfilling their job contracts, this is going to happen over and over again. I asked the Minister what accountability looks like to him. How will it be implemented? The reality is that the buck stops with the Government. The Minister is right that if we do not see accountability here, there will be accountability in the ballot box.

-----in streamlining our planning system. In many instances, though not all, cost overruns are caused by delays in planning or objections. We cannot continue to see that if we need to deliver, which we do, significant infrastructural projects like, as the Deputy mentioned, metro north and others. We need a planning system and planning legislation that underpins that, so I-----