Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

To me, the upping of housing provision under the approved housing bodies was a deliberate tactic to try to bypass the fiscal rules. It would seem that maybe the game is up on that now.

I wanted to raise a number of issues with the Department about the EU fiscal rules. Some of these points came up in the special committee on housing and homelessness. Has there been any movement on them in the 18 months since that committee sat?

The then Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, told the housing committee that following the referendum in 2012, the European fiscal rules are constitutional. He said:

We do not have a shortage of money [for housing]. We have almost balanced the budget and can borrow money. [...] We would get the money at less than 1% for ten years. The key problem is not a shortage of money. We can raise the money. [...] The problem is that it goes on the balance sheet and then we break the fiscal rules and the expenditure ceilings.

That is the Minister for Finance himself explaining how the EU fiscal rules are a problem for us resolving our housing crisis. The former Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, wrote to the European Commission complaining that the EU rules to classify certain investments were posing a significant threat to the ability to fund major projects in housing, transport and water. The Opposition spokesperson for housing also agreed they were a problem.

The report of the committee on housing and homelessness called on the Government to seek flexibility. To me, that is very weak. Has the Department of Finance or the leading civil servants in it made any efforts to talk to the Government and persuade it to seek a derogation from these EU fiscal rules to solve our housing emergency? Have we held any meeting with the EU at any level to say that Ireland has a housing problem and we need to break these rules?

The labyrinthine diagram that the witness showed us is like the "tangled web we weave," as the poem states. Everything is being done to try to find this elusive off-balance sheet model and it would seem now that the ploy of using approved housing bodies rather than local authorities could be called out by EUROSTAT. We will wait and see. It is a delay and a barrier to resolving the housing crisis. The Department's civil servants should be talking to the Government about it.

If the approved housing bodies do not prove to be a mechanism for funding social housing, approximately what amount of money is left in the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund? This is a fund from which we do not have to borrow and to which the taxpayers contributed over the years. Most of it was used to bail out the banks and is gone. There was up to €7 billion when the last Government came into office but I think it might be down to about €4 billion now. Perhaps the Department officials could clarify that point. Is that not the pot of gold we need to solve the housing crisis? The barrier to it is the EU fiscal rules. There should be much more attention focused on this. The EU is now posing as our great friend in the negotiations over Brexit. If it is our great friend, are we now seeking its permission to use money that we actually have? That is what we should be using to build houses rather than trying to find other ploys through approved housing bodies that have not got the means or wherewithal to build on the scale and at the speed that we need.