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

If one asks the families who have moved into the 22 units in Poppintree about their experience, I think one would get a pretty positive response from the vast majority of them. We are trying to get volume into the system to start to deal with the housing needs of many families in a more proactive way. Rapid build is just part of the solution and it will be a very small part in percentage terms. I anticipate that most social housing estates will be built with conventional building methods.

The Deputy spoke about bricks and mortar. There are a lot of bricks involved in rapid-build housing as well but they are pre-assembled in factories and they are brought in by crane. That is the only difference. We need to get away from labelling rapid-build housing as some kind of inferior product. If it is an inferior product, we should not be using it. That is all I want to say on rapid-build housing. It is the third time we have come back to it.

In respect of the moratorium on evictions, it depends what type of eviction one is talking about. We are looking at the broad rental market in terms of potential changes and we have said we would have a rental strategy in place by the end of the year. We are looking at issues around security of tenure and rent predictability. We are also looking at ensuring it is an attractive market for landlords because otherwise we will see a continuation of what has been happening over the last 18 months where many people have been taking their properties out of the rental market. My understanding is that over the last 18 months, approximately 30,000 housing units have been taken out of the housing market-----