Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The seriousness of the housing crisis today is equivalent to the conditions of the national finances at the time that merited that legislation. If there was a case for FEMPI then there is a case for housing emergency legislation in the public interest. That is not Mr. Watt's Department but he could take that on board because it is a recurring theme here.

We feel that while mistakes were made getting into the financial crisis, one of the biggest mistakes made during the crisis was not to plan for the exit from it. We are talking now about planning, zoning, sites and speeding up the planning process. That should have been done three years ago at very little cost so that the houses we need now would have been built rather than in the next two or three years. The housing plan is going out. The troika left in 2013 and while another country would have planned for the recovery, we made no plans. We waited till we got to where we are and sat back for two years. We are two years behind catching up in the housing situation. I am not saying this is the fault of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform but collectively, the Government and the Oireachtas did not plan adequately and we are playing massive catch up and it is getting harder and harder to catch up.

As there are no more questions I thank everybody for coming here today. I apologise again for the late start. One of the reasons for it was that we wanted to conclude all our business on the Votes in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report before the Dáil recess and we had other reports on the Garda Síochána and third level education, not to mention Project Eagle, which took up quite a lot of our work a few months earlier.

The committee agrees to dispose of Votes 7, Chapters 1, 2 and 18, the finance Votes, which it discussed this morning. It also agrees to dispose of Votes 11, 12, 18 and 39 and Chapter 3 for this Department, which we have discussed.