Mr. Dick Brady:

That is a different matter altogether. Where did we start with this? Two years ago, the city council and the homeless executive saw that we had a problem coming over the hill. Families were being made homeless and the only places we could put them into were hotels. We agreed at that time with our elected members that hotels were not suitable places for families to be brought up in and we needed to do something about this. We had a three-prong strategy. Part one was to keep people in their properties for as long as they could. To do that, we made two suggestions. One was rent receivership, while the other was to give advice to people to help them stay there. This was advice and intervention from Threshold.

The second part of the strategy was to come up with an intermediate solution that would provide rapid-build homes in which people could live while we got on with the second part of the operation - namely, finding accommodation more suitable for their needs. These units, which people are calling transient, will be put in place in order for us to keep families in humane conditions while we find them alternative accommodation. I do not believe there is anything more transient than a hotel room. I believe the move towards rapid-build, as well as using it in the manner I have described, is a far better proposition for the citizens, the families and the children of this country.

The local authorities do not operate in a vacuum. All the targets we operate come from the Government's social housing strategy to 2020. Each local authority has been given its portion of those units that it must provide. Part of that strategy shows some 75,000 units being provided through the private sector by means of leasing, HAP, RAS, or some other variation. That is the framework in which we are working. When the managers say they are meeting their targets, they are meeting the targets as set by the Government.

With regard to money, the State has financed that particular programme. In speaking about money, it is worth understanding that the country collapsed some time around 2008 and the amount of money available to the State to put into housing and other essential services was extremely limited. It is only in recent times that we have started to see some sort of uplift and space in which the Government can move money. Somebody asked a question on off-balance sheet borrowing and so forth. The State has bought into a financial compact with its European partners and we have made agreements with the EU and the International Monetary Fund, IMF, relating to the State's borrowing. We in the local authorities have to abide by those rules just as much as the State as a whole. Those rules can and are causing some problems for housing finance.