Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Okay. I agree very much with that. It is something I have been arguing for quite a long time. Has that lesson been taken on board? Are there changes to plans for capital investment that would significantly move us on from the Rebuilding Ireland targets? As a reminder, the initial Rebuilding Ireland targets were for about 133,000 social housing units, of which roughly 90,000 were going to be provided through HAP, RAS or leasing. A minority would be directly constructed public housing. If the argument set out in that IGEES report is correct, and I believe it is absolutely correct, will we move on from that and wean ourselves off the RAS and HAP arrangements, which will potentially cost us billions? While I know Mr. Downes cannot make the policy decision, has anything changed, to his knowledge? Has anything changed in respect of the actual objective of clearing the social housing waiting lists? That is what it all comes down to in the end. We hear figures of this billion and that billion bandied about and various targets but what, as Mr. Downes understands it, is the endgame of all this? If it was up to me, it would be that we seek to get to a point where people are not waiting for 20, 10 or even five years for social housing but that we had a plan to invest sufficiently in housing stock whereby we do not have any waiting lists at all, or certainly not ones that extend much beyond two or three years. Has anything changed or are we still essentially working towards a slightly varied version of the Rebuilding Ireland plan?

That is my first question. Will I do them all in one go?