Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Ms Murphy's comments.

Officially, under the Government's building programme, there will be 25,000 units a year. If that figure can be increased by whatever formula, it will happen and we can borrow to do it. The Housing Finance Agency can borrow at a rate of 1.2% and lend to local authorities. Therefore, getting more funds is not an issue. Other will decide whether it will be off or on-balance sheet, but we must maximise whatever we can get.

My question to Ms Murphy is about the 200,000 houses which are vacant throughout the country. The Government's position is that 70,000 are to be supplied in the next three or four years by the private sector, essentially, for HAP applicants. I do not see any sign of this happening because no houses are being released onto the market, even though there are houses empty. Even if there is a problem with two thirds of them, we must still be able to get one third of them. I wonder what Ms Murphy thinks of the following suggestion and I expect Deputy Ruth Coppinger to give out to me. We need to have a strategy in place to encourage the owners of these houses to enter into a three, four or five-year commitment to provide them for local authorities or housing agencies in order to give them to tenants who urgently need housing. In the meantime, when we ramp up the building programme, we can look at the provision of tax incentives. It would be far cheaper for us to get, through the provision of a minor tax incentive for an owner, a house already built rather than spending €100,000 to €200,000 to have one built. We would get a much bigger bang for our buck. I wonder whether Ms Murphy has a view on the matter. It seems that is the crucial and critical way forward to increase supply which would happen more or less overnight.