Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Okay. I thank the witnesses. I will make one further point. We talk about local authorities not directly building. We get responses in the Dáil to the effect that 10,000 homes have been delivered into the housing stock. The concern we have is that there is one line of delivery that is probably underperforming, and we must ask what blockages are there. Sometimes there can be a lot of houses in one local authority one year and none the next year because it is a big scheme or something like that. We can get a kind of distorted view and I accept that. However, if I use my own local authority, for example, in 2022, the council met its targets. We know there were no houses directly built in Kildare last year by the local authority that were on that list. However, it met the targets in terms of builds for 370, and the long-term leasing was 262. It paints a very different picture. When 10,000 are added, the public presumption is that the local authorities are building, but they are not. Some of those are turnkey and some are part 5. We need them all. However, the underdelivery of direct builds is really the point several of us feel really needs to have a magnifying glass on it about what the impediments are.