Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is a need for some realism in this conversation. We simply do not have the social housing stock to accommodate everybody's needs. The question is whether we continue to try to accommodate the people who cannot get accommodated by allocation through rent supplement or whether we try to put something in place with a bit more certainty that is more effective than rent supplement. In HAP that is what we have been doing. That is what I have been doing. I am looking across at Senator Paudie Coffey who was very involved in designing HAP. From my experience of speaking to people on HAP, they no longer have to deal directly with landlords because the local authority does that for them. If they are lucky enough to get a job and increase their income, they can manage their transition out of HAP over time. It has much more flexibility and more certainty than rent supplement has. It is not perfect, perhaps, for many people, but it is a housing solution that makes sense in the current environment. Certainly, the transition over time on to HAP of people currently on rent supplement makes a lot of sense. I take the point that there are many people who only want to be allocated a council house or a social house and they have to make do with HAP for the moment. Until we start building, acquiring and leasing long-term large numbers of social houses, we will have to deal with the realities of where we are rather than trying to create a perfect solution for everybody. We need to be upfront about that.

The other thing we should say is that 120 people have already been transferred to social housing from HAP. It has only been available since 2014. It is not like one never gets a transfer. There have already been 120 of them.

I take the Deputy's point on rapid build and silver bullets. These clearly are not a silver bullet. The 1,500 houses on rapid build will be prioritised for homeless families and will help us make the transition for those families into permanent sustainable housing solutions. They are a hell of a lot better than a hotel room or bed and breakfast accommodation. I share some of the frustration over the 22 units in Ballymun. It was a pilot project and there were some mistakes made but there were also some really good lessons learnt from it.