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

I thank the Senator for acknowledging the hard work of the officials; it is very much appreciated. I also thank him for the congratulations he offered to Mr. David Walsh. I cannot think of a better person to lead An Bord Pleanála into the future. I wish him well too.

The Senator is correct to note that people are angry and hurt. They are right to be. We have to continue to make progress and to look at what is working and continue that work, as well as looking at what is not working and consider how we can fix it. The Senator has challenged me to have a housing summit with the Oireachtas. We will do that after the budget. We will announce further initiatives in the budget concerning what we are doing with our money. We can then get together in the format suggested. We might include some of the stakeholders as well. We should put every available resource into dealing with this crisis. When I attend a constituency I invite any member who is there. The Land Development Agency proposal, unfortunately, was leaked out of different part of Government, and we had to try to keep it as close to our chests as we could because there are vested interests in all of these things. There are certain Departments and agencies which do not want to give up their land for housing. However, we are going to take that land and use it for housing because we have to. By 23 October other Departments will have to provide Cabinet their proposals for lands to be made available to the agency initially. We already have the first tranche done, and Dundrum is a part of that, and we are negotiating for further tranches. The Departments we have engaged with to date have been superb in terms of their willingness to come forward with public land for new housing for the public. That is a big piece of work that has to be done.

The Senator mentioned different sites. I will not go into that because time is limited. On the NAMA offers, unfortunately not all the houses offered were suitable for local authority housing. I answered a parliamentary question in the Dáil today which provides some numbers about what the housing agency is trying to do with its €70 million acquisition fund. It gives a breakdown of the bids in place. There are roughly 1,000 in the system at the moment, out of the 1,600 we hope to have by 2020.