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

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I will run through them as quickly as I can in the time available. I have spoken on the point that was made about passing the buck. I recently communicated with local authorities about emergency accommodation. That intervention was about looking at the number of families in hotels without seeing a corresponding programme to get them out of hotels and into hubs. I have been defending local authority builds for the past 14 months and I will defend them again today. Some local authorities are doing great work and some are not. I had similar concerns last year about how our build trajectory was going, but we were just 8% off our build target at the end of the year. We exceeded every other target we had in areas such as acquisitions, leasing and voids. A significant volume of work was done. Along with my officials, I will continue to drive the local authorities until the end of the year to ensure we hit our targets for this year.

I am looking at raising the cap on the one-stage approval process. It has been suggested that everything is too slow in the Department. My officials work incredibly hard. When we are building houses, they have to be safe. They have to be planned well. People have proposed certain shortcuts to me. They have said that every social housing scheme should be designed the same, on the basis that everything could be done much more quickly if there was just one design plan.