Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy should focus on eliminating bureaucracy in his own department rather than threatening to remove powers from local authorities, Fianna Fáil finance spokesman Michael McGrath has said.
Mr McGrath said he believed Mr Murphy's threat to use emergency powers to strip local authorities of their power to provide emergency accommodation was never likely to happen and was designed as "a headline-grabbing announcement to coincide with the Fine Gael think-in in Galway".
Mr Murphy told the Fine Gael gathering the number of families in emergency accommodation in some local authority areas was “unacceptable” and that he had written to a number of unnamed councils telling them to make immediate changes.
“And if they don’t, I will have recourse to emergency powers within my department to step in and take control of some of those functions ... There are certain local authorities that haven’t put in place family hubs – we know family hubs are the best response, not hotels,” said Mr Murphy.
Bigger problem
Mr McGrath said that while some local authorities may have been tardy in delivering emergency accommodation, he believed departmental bureaucracy was a bigger problem based on feedback he had received from councillors around the State.
“It would be wrong and misleading to suggest there aren’t unnecessary delays at department level – the process of getting approval from the department from the conception of a housing scheme to the commencement of construction is extremely difficult,” he said. “It is a four-stage approval process and the feedback that I am getting from local authorities is that the department is constantly looking over their shoulder right down to dealing with micro issues such as the size of windows and the technical specifications.”
Mr McGrath said there needed to be an element of trust between the department and local authorities, who should be given greater autonomy to get on with the job of delivering housing to address the crisis facing a growing number of people.
‘Deflecting attention’
“I think it [the Minister’s warning] is a threat that will not come to fruition but it is a reaction aimed at deflecting attention away from central Government, the Department of Housing and the Minister, but ultimately policy is driven from the centre,” he said.
Mr McGrath said there were several “tools” available to Mr Murphy in his own department to help address the delays including accelerating the approval process and giving greater autonomy to local authorities rather than stripping away their powers.
