‘We do not need housing tsar' says sec gen at Department of Housing
The appointment of a 'housing tsar' has been opposed by the top civil servant at the Department of Housing, Graham Doyle.
Mr Doyle spoke against the introduction of a new 'tsar' at the Property Industry Ireland (PII) conference in Dublin on Thursday.
'I like that poll, I voted no,' Mr Doyle said, referring to a poll of conference attendees on whether a housing tsar was necessary.
'We do not need a housing tsar, can I just clear this one up, once and for all.'
READ MORE
The position to head the new Housing Activation Office (HAO) was suggested by Minister James Browne, who also spoke at the conference.
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Why is the housing crisis Ireland's most enduring failure?
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Housing tsar row masks a much deeper problem for the Government
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While an
appointment was blocked by Fine Gael
at the start of May, the Government has insisted it will be going ahead with the plan.
Responding to the questions on the secretary general's comments on Thursday Minister for Public Expenditure and Infrastructure Jack Chambers said: 'We've been very clear. The Government position is that there will be someone leading the Housing Activation Office, and it's a matter of Government policy and direction that that's what will occur.'
Mr Chambers, speaking at the launch of the public consultation period for the National Development Plan review, added that the secretary general's view 'might be his own perspective' but 'he'll have to implement what Government decides'.
The HAO position is intended to eliminate blockages stopping the development of new housing units.
'The Minister and the department have a job to do around housing policy – it's very much about creating an environment for people in this room to deliver and do what they do,' Mr Doyle went on to say at the conference.
He stressed that the work the department does is in the policy and funding space as well as removing obstacles for construction efforts.
'We don't need a tsar to do all of that and we never, ever used the word tsar,' he said.
'What we do need is an interventionist approach on the ground, at the site level, where we are talking about coalescing the various infrastructure, the local authority actions and infrastructure pieces.
'There is a sense in some quarters that if you knock a few heads together, if you give enough people a kick in the backside, then things happen. I only wish that was the case.'
He said the way to 'coalesce' the actions of the State bodies to maximise housing output 'is to look at all those very detailed issues down at that level.'
'Those who said this is about doing the Minister's job are talking utter nonsense,' Mr Doyle said. 'As a civil servant, I don't like using phrases like that, but it really was.'
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Irish Times
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Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Irish Times
Fund set up by Micheál Martin 20 years ago to cut hospital waiting lists under fresh scrutiny
In February, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill became the latest Minister for Health to announce a new initiative to reduce the amount of time patients have to wait for treatment in public hospitals . The Irish health system has been struggling for years to deal with growing waiting lists with bed and staffing capacity lagging behind demand. The answer for successive governments has been to either use the private sector or to get existing personnel to do more in their own time, while the Health Service Executive moved to increase its own resources. The amount of money allocated to these initiatives has been staggering. The Minister's plan in February involved a €420 million investment, including €190 million for the HSE and €230 million for the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) – the organisation established by Micheál Martin 20 years ago to buy treatment for public patients. 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On April 18th, Mr Gloster directed his senior leadership team to halt, for the present at least, aspects of the 'insourcing' arrangements. He commissioned a survey to establish the dependency of the health system on such practices and to ensure 'there were no unintended consequences'. Mr Gloster suspended insourcing where staff were 'engaged, hired or paid' by separate entities on initiatives in their area of work. Insourcing was only permitted in cases where the HSE directly engaged its own staff through payroll. His instructions followed discussions with Ms Carroll MacNeill and followed an internal audit report, details of which were revealed in The Irish Times last September. The HSE internal audit found two companies which received more than €1.5 million between them in contracts awarded by University Hospital Limerick without a competitive procurement process were owned or part-owned by employees at the facility. A third company, which received a contract of nearly €400,000, had a HSE employee at a different hospital as a director. Auditors stated €14.2 million was paid out to third-party providers by University Hospital Limerick in 2023 under the Government waiting list initiative without an open procurement process. Auditors said there was no evidence of the HSE employees being involved in the awarding of the contracts. In May, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín told the Dáil in one case a consultant created a firm to read scans and 'used the hospital public waiting lists to then funnel work through rostering into his own private company'. The NTPF said it was deeply concerned at the CHI internal report. It said it had never received any complaints about hospitals or doctors. Last year, the fund paid €155 million to private hospitals and about €80 million to public facilities. It seeks private hospitals to tender for packages of care and it then attempts to match this capacity with those waiting longest in public facilities. Sara Burke, associate professor of health policy at Trinity College, said the NTPF and the various waiting list initiatives were initially established more than 20 years ago as temporary measures while the State built up its own public capacity. They had, however, become permanent, integral parts of the system, she said. 'Given the amounts of money now being allocated, there is a need to look at how transparent the arrangements are and the governance of these schemes,' she said. The Opposition is now calling for reforms. David Cullinane of Sinn Féin said there were concerns about potential conflicts of interest and called for a centralised system which would see patients referred to a hospital rather than an individual consultant. 'We have to ask genuine questions about what work some consultants are doing from Monday to Friday to carry out public procedures. We need to contrast that with the so-called blitzes and private clinics they are organising and running, while charging €200 for each client they see and making very handsome amounts of money.' Marie Sherlock of the Labour Party said she was uncomfortable about how the current arrangements had grown, the dependency on it that had developed and 'the ability of the public system to wean itself off it'. Mr Tóibín questioned the safeguards in place against conflicts of interest. 'Last year 80,000 public patients were treated in private hospitals at a cost of €100 million. The majority of these treatments should have been done in the public system.' Ms Carroll MacNeill told the Dáil she would be taking further steps to remove the anomalies, which she said existed 'because of the overhanging mix of public and private activity'.
