Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the team from the Department, and particularly thank the Secretary General, Mr. McCarthy, for his presentation. First, I want to put on the record it was disappointing that we did not have a presentation on the review of the action plan for housing and homelessness, which was originally scheduled for 7 December. Mr. McCarthy will recall we had a piece of correspondence from his Department on the reasons.

There is a national housing crisis. I read a piece by the Minister, to be fair to him, only two days ago in The Irish Times. It is another one of the pieces to which Deputy Ó Broin refers about the usual such as, for instance, the importance of joined-up responses, how in working together we can rebuild Ireland and the 47,000 units. I accept all of that.

The Minister got what he wanted. The Department got what it wanted. Ultimately, through their Minister, they got Rebuilding Ireland - Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness, which is Government policy and which we all are working to and agreed to. They got the necessary legislative support that was required to give effect to this plan and vision. That is a fact as is all good. As I stated at the first meeting I attended as a member of this committee, what the Minister did was a brave decision but there was only one way out. If he could not explain what he was doing, he was failing. He published at the back of the document specific dates and timelines.

Mr. McCarthy is talking about the first, second and third quarters in 2016. We are now in 2017 and Mr. McCarthy is only reporting on one element. This is so crucial the joint committee will need to have faster responses from the Department. I might as well say what I feel but it was an affront for the Department not to come before this committee when it was scheduled to so do to give a report on the Government policy. This is the Oireachtas joint committee and this is one of the key elements that will be considered throughout the work of this committee. I am conscious that the Chairman wants to deal with the different issues under the pillars, but that is merely an opening remark.

Clearly, coming from the previous speakers is the issue of the format. Why can we not have a standard format? Reading a speech is all very fine, but Mr. McCarthy set out his excellent format at the back of this document in which there are timelines, etc. We should have a format which is consistent through every report on this document, which sets out each of the items and objectives. We know how many objectives and items are in the report. There are 84 distinct actions under the five pillars. It is all clear and well done and is well set out. Arising from all of this and the ongoing discussion, I recommend that the format be established, that the Department have a proper working format which replicates the format of the Department in this document in order that members can constantly see how it is progressing.

We need to have greater details. Deputy Ó Broin talked about a metric. Also, there is an inconsistency on the data every time one reads a paper. The Department published the delightful Summary of Social Housing Assessments 2016 in December 2016, for which I thank the Department, as I rang up and was sent a copy the next day. The previous one was dated up to 2013. We had a housing crisis but we had no summary of the social assessment need until December 2016. I circulated the summary to a number of local authorities and had feedback from a senior level within these local authorities to the effect that there were inconsistencies about the figures, and I am happy to discuss that with Mr. McCarthy later. There are issues in this regard and these data need to be validated. There are inconsistencies in local authority chief executives saying it is something else and the Department stating these are the facts, people are falling off lists but no one really needs to know.

I will finish at that point. I will come back in at the various pillars, if I may. I make the point that we have to speed it up. What is Mr. McCarthy talking about? Are we talking about the last quarter, which is October, November and December 2016 or what? We need to be consistent with the quarter of when this was published because I would like to think that for every quarter in 2017, we will have a comprehensive report. The key point is the format of it. The format should be clearly set up against the format the Department established in its document.