Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The summit was not a reactive move. I had been meeting with the chief executives of the local authorities during the summer and I realised in July that I needed to bring everyone together.

This was to get everyone onto the same page and see what new measures we needed to take. That summit was arranged then. It was not a housing summit for everyone, it was for the chief executives of the local authorities who are responsible to me. In the course of that week, and indeed every week since I have been in this job, I met representatives of the housing bodies and organisations as well as of the voluntary groups. This was so that I could have information from them to hand as I then put questions to the local authority chief executives. The Chair of the Oireachtas committee attended as a witness rather than as a participant because I thought it important that she be there.

In response to the question on social housing targets, the figure is a 30% increase for what we will directly build for local authorities and housing bodies. That amounts to 3,800 units. I am focusing on that figure because I do not want to rely on the private sector for the delivery of social housing. We will get units through Part V which will increase that number. We will get units through void reconversions which will increase that number again and bring it up to 5,000. It is important, however, that we focus on what we are building ourselves and that is why I refer to that number. When one includes acquisitions as well as leasing, which does come into the stock, the number then goes up to almost 8,000, which is not far off that 10,000 that many feel should be delivered every year. We are ramping up here and ramping up quickly. The numbers for social housing are good.

I now come to the issue of homelessness. As I mentioned earlier - perhaps the member was not here - I was in Limerick yesterday. There is a particular problem there with homeless families, as the member will know from the website. I met the CEO who assured me that almost all families will be accommodated in either hubs or permanent accommodation before Christmas, which is important. The homelessness problem is concentrated in certain areas, and that is why we have things like the housing assistance payment, HAP, place finder in those areas, something we are also rolling out nationally. We have also decided to appoint a Housing First national director and there will be Housing First places outside of Dublin for the first time as well. We will now have exit co-ordinators coming in as a preventative measure to keep people from falling back into homelessness.

With regard to what Dún Laoghaire is and has been doing, we supported Councillor John Bailey's mix of social and affordable housing. I met Councillor Bailey early on in this proposal and I had my officials look at it several times. The CEO was also aware of it, which helped.