Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

You are going halfway. I am asking the Department to go the whole way. We have a housing crisis. My previous contribution was on the underspend. The only area where there is an overspend is in providing homeless accommodation. Why? We have underperformance right across the board. We are at the end of the year. I am sure we are all interested and want to provide more good-quality homes. We cannot have a situation where, year after year, we face underspends right across the programmes. The one big gaping hole in this is the local authority housing delivery programme. I am not saying this from an ideological point of view but from the perspective of practical, human, population and societal need. We have to get this right and we are not doing it.

We started house-building programmes in a serious way in the past four to six years. We had the Covid pandemic, which was an awful interruption. We have come out the far side of that but we cannot continue, year after year, allowing a situation where we are totally underperforming right across the programmes, particularly as regards this programme, which should be, and was, the centrepiece. When there was less technical information and less mechanisation, we were able to do all these things. Now, we seem to be paralysed.