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

I cannot direct local authorities on allocations but if the Senator has a particular case in mind, he might bring it to my attention privately. The vacant home tax was something I wanted to do when I came into office. When we looked at the detailed data ourselves, using people in the Department and local authorities who had advanced vacancy research, it was clear that it was not the low-hanging fruit we originally thought . Apart from that, tens of millions of euro are available in the Department to open up vacant homes and get them used again, which is happening but not as quickly as we hoped it would. The recent Indecon report recommended keeping the possibility of a tax under review and I will do that but there will not be a vacant home tax in the next budget.

A levy on holiday homes was proposed, which means more taxes and I am sure the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, will appreciate the suggestion. The LPT is already paid on holiday homes and there are no proposals for any increased levy. A period of 59 weeks for shovel-ready sites is quite good for big developments. As I said earlier, I am looking at stage 1 at the moment but 59 weeks for the planning, design and procurement for 40 or 50 homes is quite good. There are 4,600 social housing homes under construction and 1,500 are about to go on site. We have designed this with local authority chief executives and those who know what they are doing are working to a 59-week timeframe, though not every local authority is working at the same speed. That is why we hold housing summits and why we have increased staff in the housing sections of local authorities by about 700 people in the past two years. We are constantly approving more project officers and programme managers and they are being billed to our Department because we have committed to paying when an authority has a site on which it can build a lot of homes.