Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is very disheartening to hear local authority managers arguing against social housing on the scale that is needed. That is how it can be interpreted.

I know some of the witnesses personally and have had dealings with them. I do not believe that is their belief, but it is as if they have absorbed this philosophy that is coming. Some 390,000 local authority houses were built in the last century. There are quite low levels of social problems actually. People keep on mentioning a handful of estates, for example Ballymun. I totally agree that social problems occurred, mainly because of isolation and lack of facilities. When I moved to Blanchardstown it was not possible to buy a pair of socks in the area until the town centre was built 20 years after the houses went in.

This is a real problem. Let us say there are 100,000 on the social housing list - apparently it was claimed yesterday that the figure is 140,000 - this would mean we would need to build 1 million houses to get rid of the social housing list. What level of social housing is acceptable to the Department and to the managers? On Monday a Fianna Fáil motion in Dublin City Council proposed having one third of houses as social houses in an estate of 40 houses or more. The immediate suggestion is that having anything more than 40 local authority houses is a major social problem. We would have to build 3,000 estates to sort out the social housing list. This is not doable.

I would like to hear more detail on the international research the witnesses cited. I do not believe the problem is mono-tenure but mono-income. I think Fine Gael took the decision to introduce tenant purchase and the €5,000 grant. It meant that every worker who had a good income sold their house and moved out of the estate. That turned the local authority houses into mono-income and destroyed many communities. That was the problem.

We need to reconfigure public housing. I do not really like the term "social housing"; I prefer council housing or public housing. We need to have a diversity of incomes among those living there. If people think we will solve the social housing problem by building 30 houses here and 20 houses there, they can forget it. Housing problems in the 1970s and 1930s were solved by building on a large scale. There would be economies of scale, which is really important for the cost. We know we have to do it - we have had the Housing Agency in. Direct build is very important. The Department mentioned four stages, two of which relate to tendering. How much time does that add on to the timescale needed? I know it is dreadfully old-fashioned, but if we had direct-build local authority workers, we could cut out the tendering and pre-tendering processes.

I am concerned about the stigmatising of estates. The word "under-class" was used earlier. I am sure it was a mistake on the Deputy's part. It is very dangerous to say that people are an under-class if they cannot get a house.