Professor P.J. Drudy:

There was a quite a lot there. Deputy mentioned social housing and I think he was getting at the reasons for social housing and the benefits from it. I see enormous benefits from the provision of social housing because almost 100,000 people are on waiting lists. Housing is closely related to good health and to productivity. People cannot be productive or healthy in any society unless they are properly housed. Ethics and morality come into this. How can we tolerate a situation where people are living on the streets?

There are so many arguments for social housing that it is unbelievable that we have built so few houses. The way we have gone backwards is to do with philosophy. If we believe that housing is a fundamental requirement of any society, surely to goodness we have to believe in social housing on the traditional model. That means that local authorities should provide them and manage them properly. They have not been good at that and they have not been good at collecting rents. There are issues about social housing such as flogging them for example. I disapprove totally of flogging off social housing because all that does is reduce the stock. We are acquiring houses at market prices and flogging them off at a discount price. That makes no sense to me. We have to build up the stock of social housing to something like 30% of the total. It is now at a few per cent.