Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is a good conversation. What I would like to see, and what we need to see, is more urgency around that conversation. Delivery of new builds in the city is always going to be constrained, for all the obvious reasons. It is more difficult and expensive, and there are more objections and all of that sort of stuff. However, the buildings I have in mind are built properties. They are vacant properties that are detracting from the existing communities and streetscapes. They are connected to the water and electricity systems. They are connected to the public transport network. There are schools, doctors and services in the areas concerned. It is a massive missed opportunity. We must stop talking about it and start moving. In all the time we are missing on this, we are adding to emergency accommodation and substandard temporary accommodation. It would be welcome if the Department could work actively. We can take Dublin City Council as an example. We could drive some accelerated pilots in that area. We all know it is complicated and challenging but if we had a few pilots and were to set a plan to deliver hundreds of these units within a timeframe, it would test all the challenges. It would test how to get around fire and planning issues and heritage considerations.

We all know it is difficult to spend the capital spend. It will be great to get money from Europe and it will be great to get expertise from Europe but I really think we need to look at how we can use existing capital funding to try to progress something there on an accelerated basis.