Government pressed on ways to tackle homelessness

The Government is under increasing pressure to beef up compulsory purchase orders and introduce a vacant home tax to tackle the homelessness crisis.

Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin was backed by a number of housing and homeless organisation in demanding both compulsorily purchase and leasing orders to allow the State take charge of houses that are unoccupied.

Mr Howlin said the number of vacant houses are “vastly out of line” with other developed countries. He said the Government must bring in a carrot-and-stick approach, through better incentives to encourage people to rent out homes, but local authorities must be given greater powers to either compulsory buy or rent unused proprieties.

It comes after the attorney general advised that there is no impediment to using compulsory purchase orders (CPO) to force the sale of empty homes.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had played down this as a solution by saying that the number of vacant homes that could be made available would be far less than the almost 200,0000 properties the CSO has identified.

Mr Howlin said: “Even if you got 10% of that it would make a very significant impact. I don’t think anybody believes for a second that the bulk of the 184,000, or even the majority of it, can be brought back into use because of the variety of legal and personal circumstances that pertain and each case will be unique.

“But we should be following up those that we can bring back into use.”

The Simon Community believes a vacant homes tax is “absolutely critical at this time” and CPOs must also considered.

Head of policy and communications Niamh Randall said: “Empty homes are the low-hanging fruit. They are the way to deliver homes very quickly. It’s about looking at incentives first and foremost for homeowners and that’s to either sell their homes, rent their homes or lease them back to the State.

“There are empty homes and empty units in Cork city centre, in Dublin city centre, and a range other city centres.”

The Peter McVerry Trust said there is a need for a major scaling-up of CPO programmes in each local authority area.

Chief executive Pat Doyle said: “We have tens of thousands of empty homes spread across our cities and towns and we need to get them back into use quickly.

“We have logged and reviewed over 600 empty properties since late June in Dublin, Kildare, and Limerick, but of that, only 36 units are in our pipeline for re-use.”