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

I confirm I am in Leinster House. I thank all our guests for their important presentations. In particular, I want to say to Ms Murphy that there were a lot of incredibly useful and practical suggestions in her presentation as to how we tackle the issue she raised around implementation. I compliment Anois on its innovative campaigning work. Please keep it up because it is important to keep highlighting this issue.

In response to Mr. Grimes and Mr. Shakespeare, I acknowledge that local authorities are doing an enormous amount of work, often under the most difficult of circumstances in terms of a lack of staff and funding. While some of the remarks I am going to make are very critical, they are not in any way critical of Mr. Grimes, Mr. Shakespeare or their teams. The problems are elsewhere.

The idea that large volumes of homes can be left vacant in a housing crisis is the equivalent of hoarding food in a famine. The State and its agencies simply should not have allowed this to happen for so long. When I compare the targets that were set under Rebuilding Ireland with the level of delivery under what Mr. Shakespeare rightly highlighted as the two main Government policy interventions over the past five years, the policy has been an abject failure. Anybody who is honest about it knows that. We were promised 3,500 repair and leases by the end of 2021. We probably have approximately 273. That is an 8% success rate, which is shockingly low by any standards. No targets for buy and renew were set by the previous Government but we only got approximately 670 units. That means that even with a very modest set of targets we are way behind. What is concerning me is that the actual targets that are set in the current Government's housing plan for bringing vacant units back into stock, 2,500 by 2026, is even less ambitious although, given that the policy is going to be, broadly, the same as the previous one, perhaps it is a more realistic target.

Ms Murphy has made a compelling case for sorting out the data war. I have always been of the view that the Central Statistics Office figures are far too high, for a variety of reasons, and I have always used the GeoDirectory figures. Even if we think the GeoDirectory's figure of 92,000 is too high and the true figure is one half or one quarter of that, we are still talking about thousands of units in areas of high demand. The data we have from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage shows that it is quicker and cheaper to bring a unit into use through buy and renew than to build a new unit. That is before one deals with the important sustainability, urban regeneration and place-making points that Anois and Ms Murphy set out. I am incredibly disheartened by how little progress there has been, despite the hard work of many people on the ground.

I think Ms Murphy has answered a fair number of my questions. I am going to ask Mr. Grimes and Mr. Shakespeare an awkward question. Ms Murphy set out a clear methodology for getting the baseline figures and until we have those figures, everything else is a mess. Do Mr. Grimes and Mr. Shakespeare think the proposition Ms Murphy has made could be implemented quickly and what would it take to establish that clear baseline so we know exactly where it is? Will Ms Murphy give us a little more information about the success in Scotland? Did they have a good framework? There will probably be a third round of questioning so I will be hanging around to pester our guests with more questions. Perhaps I will leave it at that for the moment.