Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I fully support Senator Cummins's suggestion that we do a session on affordable housing. We know the Minister is due to introduce a new affordable housing scheme and there might be more money in the budget for it, so that is something we should do.

On Senator Fitzpatrick's proposal, the Department is doing an assessment of the financing of all the different delivery mechanisms for social housing. It is not looking at affordable housing but there are ten different delivery mechanisms for social housing being examined. We will not get the two issues into one session. I like Senator Fitzpatrick's idea but to do it justice we would have to separate them out. It might be worthwhile trying to get to the affordable housing bit early and finding out from the Department when its assessment will be complete because the Department will have all of the data. As soon as the Department has completed that report, its representatives should come in, share it with us and allow us to give them our views. The Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform have also done some good research which they presented to us previously. That research looked at the difference between the housing assistance payment, HAP, the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, and leasing versus new builds, and there were some good data there. Given that the Department is doing the research, we should bring it in the moment it is ready. We would have a more productive session that way.