Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will comment on south Dublin this time and as I said, I will return to Fingal.

I will start by acknowledging the positives because they are not necessarily always aired. South Dublin County Council residents have not been shy about coming forward for the first-home shared equity scheme and I understand a number of them have already received their certificates of eligibility. As of June 2022, construction of 4,000 homes had started in the previous 12 months and 1,000 new homes were completed in that time. All of us on the ground in the constituency see that every day. We see hoardings up, boots on sites and cranes in the skyline in Liffey Valley, Clondalkin, Lucan, the N4 and in the villages. All of those sites represent families, couples and single people who will end up in those homes and that is welcome.

As the witnesses know, housing is a massive issue in our area. It is a particularly big issue in my constituency of Dublin Mid-West and South Dublin County Council's housing delivery plans focus more heavily on Dublin-Midwest than Dublin South-West. We are home to two strategic development zones, Adamstown and Clonburris, and nearly 70% of social homes in the council's pipeline are due to be delivered in Dublin Mid-West rather than Dublin South-West. That is welcome and I want to ensure we get it right. What I mean by that is that we deliver homes hand-in-hand with infrastructure and the URDF funding that Mr. McLoughlin mentioned means that the likes of the Celbridge link road will open in the coming weeks. That will provide much anticipated traffic congestion relief in Lucan. Funding like that is being and must be used to build roads, schools and amenities that need to come hand-in-hand with those quite large-scale projects.

Second, I reiterate it is important that we deliver the right tenure and mix of homes. In September 2019 South Dublin County Council sought expressions of interest in affordable homes. I was a councillor at the time and it was something I was keen to do because even then when no national affordable housing scheme was in place, we had an affordability issue in Dublin and especially in Dublin Mid-West. Now as a Deputy one of the biggest concerns I hear from young people and their parents is that they will not be able to afford to buy their own homes. Some 2,000 people applied for that back then and the council's housing needs demand assessment, HNDA, estimates 2,500 more people have affordability problems. The national target is 1,200 affordable purchase homes over the five or seven years since 2019. Is that enough and is the right balance being struck?