Cabinet Committees Dail Éireann — 2025-12-16 ============================================================ Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central There were quite a number of questions there, beginning with Deputy Séamus McGrath. I welcome also the good initiative we have announced today, namely the extension of the vacant refurbishment grant to 2030, but specifically on the commercial properties and the €140,000 plus a €5,000 grant for assistance to support the owner to design a project. The Deputy is right in saying that we need to make sure that the local authorities prioritise this - in other words, that they put a project manager or whatever in charge of this operation in the towns and the cities to make this a reality. It needs to be driven with someone who is accountable and who is doing this every single day, in my view. I will talk to the Minister about that. We need to alert all the business committees in towns and cities because people need to know. If you combine it with the living city initiative, there are real prospects of, once and for all, getting activity in towns and city centres to address dereliction and allow for change of use. Due to changing patterns of trade and so on, many commercial uses are no longer sustainable, so there is an opportunity for increased numbers residential units in towns and cities. Deputy McAuliffe raised the topic of the Santry Boxing Club. I was recently with the Land Development Agency, LDA, on the southside, where an existing boxing club has been incorporated into a housing development. A new boxing club is being built in the housing development. That is the way to go. Is the local authority involved in the specific development to which the Deputy referred? It is. The local authority should look seriously at that example. Amenities matter in communities and society. They give young people opportunities. It seems to me that some accommodation must be made for Santry Boxing Club. The other example was a good initiative. The name of the boxing club escapes me now, but the people will have a first-class boxing club as a result of the development. It might be a bigger development. In fairness to the LDA, it saw that needed to be done. The Deputy might give me the details. Deputy Shane Moynihan spoke about the interdependence of the national transport plan in terms of infrastructure and housing delivery. Housing delivery will depend on infrastructure delivery. I am acutely aware of planning considerations. South Dublin County Council is looking at 10,000 to 18,000 new zonings for housing. That will be dependent on DART+ South West. I have had meetings with the Minister for public expenditure and the Minister for climate and transport, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to ensure we can underpin the development of DART+ South West. We can make progress on that to give the certainty that the council, Deputy Moynihan and the people in the area require. Deputy Connolly asked about quarterly tables for social housing. He asked about applying such an approach to affordable housing. I will talk to the Minister. It is a fair point. The councils control a bit more for social housing, but outputs should be across the board. The first issue is to highlight those councils that are not performing. It becomes fairly obvious in a league table scenario which councils are not performing. The actions can take a number of forms. We have to work through the actions. There could be disincentives or limited finance. We have to work through that, but there must be consequences or direct action from the State to override councils that are not performing in respect of housing more generally. Deputy O'Meara spoke about log cabins and modular homes. I hope that the Minister will in February have a list of exempted developments. I understand it has expanded significantly. There have been a lot of submissions from Government Departments and agencies, particularly those with acute issues, including health, for example, where we need urgent public services. The Minister recently indicated to me that it would be February that we will have completion of that. It is fairly complex and much bigger than we originally anticipated. The rural housing guidelines need to be published. I have asked the Minister to prioritise that. I fully accept what the Deputy is saying about the potential for enabling and helping young people in rural Ireland to afford housing at a reasonable cost when it comes to buying or renting. We will keep an eye on that. We will look at the development levies over time in respect of rural buildings on people's land although services of one kind or another are required. I fundamentally agree with Deputy Coppinger that cities should be liveable and that there should be strong social support and creative cultural amenities. The Deputy said the local authority is depending on someone else. Other local authorities tend to get on with it and are in a position to facilitate either the acquisition or purchase of a building without having to do the simple equation and getting the Department to pay out for every single acquisition. The Minister for public expenditure has taken an interest in this issue. I will check the current lie of the land in respect of the Complex. I know Deputy Heneghan also raised that issue. To Deputy Conway-Walsh, I say that there is no reason why voids should take so long. There has to be some framework of control for the Department. We discovered recently with the tenant in situ scheme that houses were being bought with people living in them. Those houses are bought by councils and suddenly there is €80,000 or €100,000 going into the house. The original objective of that was to stop people going into homelessness. When a local authority house becomes vacant, unless there is something majorly wrong structurally, it should be occupied within a month. We have given huge money to local authorities for voids over the past five years. They should get on with it. They let the houses lie idle for too long. It is inexcusable. In some councils, there is inertia. I have seen it. People leave very good houses for one reason or another, the shutters go up and the houses are left there for three or four months. Those houses should be reoccupied once the electrics and everything else are grand. If we have to get around to repairing them, we can at least give someone the house. That is my view. I get impatient about it from time to time, to be honest. I hear what the Deputy is saying. If you give an upfront grant, there is no guarantee it will be spent on voids, and that is the problem. I do not have the details of the 40-turnkey units to which Deputy Heneghan referred. Are they in Dún Laoghaire? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-16