Imelda Munster (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Department can revert to me on that and it can perhaps revert to me on whether it has plans to run those two processes in parallel. It would certainly help and it is quite astonishing it has not been done.

The other aspect I wanted to touch on was the housing maintenance budgets. Local authority income from rental is less than half of the response maintenance, and that is not taking into account the structural maintenance. I will give the example of the local authority in County Louth, where there have been more than 4,000 maintenance requests for this year to date, with more than 425 coming in during October. There are properties where windows have to be nailed shut, and doors one could put a finger through. Local authority management have said they are starved of funding. That is just one local authority but there is clearly an issue that local authorities are starved of funding. I imagine that if the Residential Tenancies Board was to go in and inspect local authority properties, they would not pass any inspection and they would be considered substandard in many cases, to say the least.

It is an area that has been flagged up by local authorities but it seems to fall on deaf ears. Are there plans to increase the funding? In addition, AHBs get more funding than local authorities for maintenance of their housing stock. Why is that?