Mr. Conor Skehan:

The issues that are being raised by Deputy Durkan, which refer back to the issues raised by Deputy Coppinger, get to the heart of it, so it is worthwhile debating these in exactly the manner the committee is doing. There is not necessarily a contradiction between the two positions. Deputy Coppinger is absolutely correct that our vision of social housing as being something that is solely for poor people - if I am not misquoting her - is something that we have to move away from. We have to start to understand that, exactly as we and our publication have said, one third of our population will need some form of support and the support will be graduated. The wonderful thing about something like the housing assistance payment is that it now allows people, like the bus driver mentioned by Deputy Coppinger or a trainee garda or young nurse, to live in a place. There are a whole range of people who are in full employment who need to have some form of support. That is the first issue.

The second issue is the type of mixture we are talking about. Deputy Durkan is dead right to haul me up on it. If I gave a mistaken impression that I am talking about building slabs of 500 semi-detached houses for local authority consumption, the Deputy is absolutely right - there is no future in that. What there is a future for is developments, perhaps 500 at a time, of which 50 are for a local authority, another 50 are for housing for the aged, and another 50 for very expensive housing, and that they are all going ahead at the same time. That is the idea. The points the Deputy has made are absolutely correct and we have to learn from them. We will have to have standards that leave things such as duplexes in the past. There should be completely new types of mix because, as we are saying to the committee, there will be mixtures of type - small, medium and large - and of tenure - owned by the State, owned by AHBs and owned privately - all mixed up together. It is a completely different type of project. We have not even really started doing it.

The last thing is that we have them among us. We can go down to places like Cherrywood, which is already under way, where we have exactly those types of mix. The advantage of going ahead on a big unit is that we get fantastic social facilities and parks, wonderful roads and very good public transportation systems which are made possible by having that overview and doing them all at the same time. When it is done right - and thanks be to God we are finally doing it right in Ireland - it works and everybody benefits. It really is a win-win situation.