Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Deputy McLoughlin asked me questions on three areas. On the unfinished housing estates, €5 million was allocated nationally this year in regard to public safety issues, and this has not all been drawn down yet. I chair an ongoing committee on unfinished estates and we have required the local authorities to have site resolution plans for the estates in their various areas. NAMA attends those meetings as well. Some of the estates are under NAMA while others are not, and NAMA is carrying out the same kind of programmes as the local authorities.

In terms of acquiring housing, we are also dealing with NAMA with regard to the acquisition of properties for social housing. The Minister, Deputy Hogan, and myself have met NAMA on a few occasions and we intend to meet it again before the end of the year in order to speed up the process. The Deputy may remember that it originally identified approximately 2,000 properties that would be suitable. The latest figure I have is that 133 of those are over the line and about 400 more are under negotiation. There was a time lag in terms of bringing those NAMA properties over the line because this process involved the original owners, the receivers and the lending institutions - there was a series of hoops to jump through. NAMA has set up a special purpose vehicle which we hope will speed up this process and we hope to transfer them more quickly in the future. The meetings we have had with NAMA have been productive in that regard.

Programmes are available to local authorities to address the issue of housing voids in terms of energy efficiency and improvement works; these are targeted particularly at vacant dwellings. The Deputy may be aware that local authorities have a sum of money available per house from our Department to improve the status of empty houses. We want to work with the local authorities to bring any housing voids back into use because there is no point in having empty houses if we can use them for families who need to be housed.

With regard to regeneration, approximately €80 million has been allocated for next year. We have not finalised the figures yet so I cannot be definite. In so far as is possible, we want to protect the regeneration budget. Ballymun must be finished in the next few years. Limerick is the next biggest regeneration project and, as the Deputy is aware, there are also projects in Sligo, Cork and Tralee. Then there are what were to be the PPP projects in Dublin that will now have to be funded in a different way because PPP is no longer viable. We are protecting the budget and we will have a significant amount of money for regeneration next year.