It is Rory Hearne, thank you.

Sentiment score: 0.36

Just to clarify, I am no relation of the former Taoiseach.

Sentiment score: -0.30

Go raibh míle maith agat. We have tens of thousands of vacant and derelict homes up and down the country. It is one of the biggest scandals and failures of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments. Government after Government has failed to tackle this issue. Buildings up and down the country are rotting, falling apart, dangerous and left vacant while we have thousands of children and families in homelessness. In Finglas in my constituency families are being made homeless while a massive building, the Drake Inn, has been left derelict for years. Trees are growing up out of it. How hard must it be for these children and families, and for a generation locked out of a home, to walk past these empty derelict buildings? They have no home and here are these buildings that could be homes left idle because of policy failure. The Minister says he is going to war on dereliction. I have to say that from my perspective, the only war he is waging on dereliction is one in his own head. The new dereliction sites tax will not come into place until 2028. Why will the Minister not implement the tax this year? There is a fundamental flaw in his derelict sites tax. It is designed to fail, just like the vacant homes tax. It is a self-assessment tax. We have 166,000 vacant homes identified by the CSO. It is a self-assessment tax but how many of those liable self-declared for the tax? The figure is 2,300. Less than 2% of the total vacant homes are liable for the vacant homes tax. It will be the same for the derelict sites tax. Local authorities are responsible for identifying the sites. At present there is huge underidentification and under-registration of these derelict sites by local authorities. What will change with this tax? Around 2,000 sites are currently identified but GeoDirectory states there are 19,000 derelict properties. If the Minister wanted to wage war on dereliction he would fund local authorities properly to compulsorily purchase derelict and vacant buildings and do them up to be used as affordable housing. He would introduce compulsory sales orders to force owners to sell buildings that are rotting and falling apart. He would introduce a vacant property tax that would actually tax the vacant homes throughout the country. He would introduce the derelict tax this year and make it compulsory. He would fund councils to be able to renovate their properties to ensure they are not leaving thousands of council properties vacant. The most reprehensible and nasty politics has emerged from the Government in recent months from the Tánaiste and the Taoiseach. This is the shift to blame immigrants and migrants for the housing crisis. It is absolutely disgusting. I read the Tánaiste's Substack where he outlined again the false claim that people in emergency accommodation do not have a legitimate right to housing. I ask the Minister to respond to this. Do people in emergency accommodation have a legitimate right to housing? We know that of course they do. What is being done by the Government is a deflection of responsibility. It is a dangerous move and it is stoking the social divisions the Tánaiste claims he is concerned about. Nowhere is there an acceptance of responsibility for the cause of the housing crisis being decades of failure in policy by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. If we look at it in terms of dereliction and vacancy, we have seen failure of Government after Government to tackle this issue. The Minister says he is waging war on it, but where is the evidence? Will we see a derelict property tax? Why will it not come into force this year? What we are seeing is words. We are not seeing action on dereliction and vacancy. It is deeply frustrating because when we look at these claims and what the Government is doing, it is fomenting and adding to the Ireland-is-full nonsense. Ireland is not full. Ireland is full of vacant and derelict buildings that Government after Government have failed to tackle and have allowed property owners to sit on while thousands of people are homeless. Again, I ask the Minister to withdraw the comments from this Government that are blaming immigrants for the housing crisis because they are literally stoking fires and attacks on people which we see happening. The housing crisis being blamed is absolutely disgraceful. Regarding policies that could be pursued, I have outlined them in terms of actually introducing a derelict sites tax. I also want to talk about Dublin City Council and its attempts to deal with dereliction. We look across Dublin and see derelict site after derelict site. Our capital city is full of them. The Minister is probably aware that Dublin City Council has developed a plan, a proposal, a policy to set up an arms-length company, which it is doing, to purchase derelict properties and renovate them. This is an excellent idea. It was developed by our own councillor, Cian Farrell, with Dublin City Council. The problem is the scale of what is being proposed and the timeframe of it. They cannot deal with it on any level that could be considered a reasonable timescale because Dublin City Council is capped in terms of its borrowing. Also, the Government is not giving Dublin City Council sufficient funding. We have a budget that will end up giving over €1 billion in VAT cuts to developers and fast food giants and yet our capital city's council does not have enough funding to meaningfully go after derelict properties and compulsory-purchase them. I mentioned my constituency of Finglas. I invite the Minister to Finglas Village to see the level of dereliction there. These are communities where people feel excluded and left behind. They go into their village centre and see derelict building after derelict building. What does it tell them about what the Government thinks about them and how it cares for them? They feel completely abandoned. I have proposed that Dublin City Council should be compulsory-purchasing buildings like the Drake Inn and converting them into affordable housing like that proposal being done, but it does not have the funding. I ask the Minister to engage with Dublin City Council and ensure it has the funding so we can have this war on dereliction he is talking about. I ask he introduce the compulsory sales orders as well and let us actually genuinely go after them and give new buildings and new homes to communities that have been excluded and tackle that issue of dereliction and vacancy which is absolutely disgraceful and needs to be tackled properly.

Sentiment score: -0.16