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

I will try to send them to the Deputy, but he has a tricky email address. He will definitely get an email.

Senator McFadden previously asked me to give her the detailed numbers on cumulative vacancies and break through what our vacancy team had done. We are happy to provide that information to anyone. We have done work on rent pressure zones relating to the current rent Bill. I cannot say more than that I understand the Senator's point. The social housing review on income eligibility has been done. We await that work. Many things that we are trying to investigate are made more challenging by the housing shortage. The housing market is still dysfunctional in many areas. It is difficult to get a proper grasp of what the need might be and what the eligibility criteria should be. That work is progressing.

I thank all those who came to the Custom House for the deep dive relating to targets. I thought it was helpful for everyone involved. Local authorities have been given resources, policies and money. I committed last year that we would have targets for each local authority by each stream of delivery and that we would publish the targets and delivery. There would be full accountability and transparency. We can see now who is overperforming, who is underperforming and what we need to do. When we have encountered significant problems with a local authority and it needs to do more, we step in to help. We established a task force some years ago for Cork city and county.

The task force has shown great results in terms of the increase in housing being provided now for those two local authority areas. The person who chaired that task force will chair the Galway city and county task force because it needs help. These are the kinds of things we can do.

The housing unit in the Department tries to troubleshoot particular issues. While one local authority may resolve successfully a problem it encounters, another local authority might know nothing about the resolution to that problem. The housing summits help to share that information, as does our housing team which is always doing this work. Local authorities are responsible to their elected members. Are the elected members playing ball with the local authority in terms of Part 8 planning applications? Are they playing ball in helping to progress the right types of housing schemes or the right types of social mix for housing schemes? All of these issues come into play at local authority level. Our responsibility is to make sure the local authorities have the policies, resources and money they require, to help address snags where they arise and to provide extra resources where they are needed. Local authorities are building houses. They achieved 96% of the target, which is huge. An extra 2,000 homes were built in 2018 compared with 2017.