Mr. John McCarthy:

I thank the Deputy for his words of welcome. The housing situation is critical. The Department relies extensively on the housing needs assessment exercise which is run every number of years and provides us with a good and reliable snapshot in time. The assessment was undertaken last year and gave us very clear evidence, as we had in previous assessments.

The Deputy mentioned that the resource base for housing has, along with most other programmes, contracted over the past number of years. This is something that we have worked hard to work our way through in terms of trying to ensure that we make the best possible use of the resources that are available to us in order to meet as many housing needs as we possibly can.

Without putting all our eggs in one basket, we have adopted a range of new measures to meet housing needs over the past number of years. For example, the social housing leasing programme was introduced. We have a programme of acquisition of units from NAMA. There is still some element of local authority building and voluntary housing building going on. We have a number of programmes to address voids, or empty houses, in order to bring those back into use. The measures are all designed to ensure that we use the resources available to us in a way that meets as much housing need as possible.

We were also minded, I suppose, back in 2008 and 2009 where there was a substantial surplus of property on the market, that it was important for us to tap into that in terms of speed of delivery. I shall put this in context and give the Deputy a sense of the impact of the evolution of the programmes. Let us take the three years from 2010 to 2012. During that time we provided just over €38 million for leasing, which allowed us to meet the housing needs of about 3,500 people. If we had used the money that was available to us to build or buy houses during that period, we would probably have been able to deliver around 250 houses. I am trying to get the following across. Yes, the resource base has reduced quite considerably. In response to the reduction in resources, but also in response to the level of need that exists, we have tried to introduce new and different ways of providing social housing so that we could meet social housing needs as far as possible from within the available resource space.