Thomas Gould (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That leads to my next question about housing maintenance. There are 146,000 social houses in the State. Two weeks ago, Sinn Féin introduced a motion on housing maintenance. We appreciate that the Government did not try to block it and allowed it to go through. That is good because housing maintenance is a huge issue. I raised a number of issues in the Dáil during that debate, including the case of a woman who had a leak in her house since 2011 and no matter what we did, we could not get the leak fixed. I showed photographs in the Dáil and three days later it was fixed. How is it possible that a local authority tenant can be left 13 years with a leak in their house? We deal with cases where tenants have aluminium single-glazed windows in their homes. If the person dies, God forbid, the council will put in new windows and doors and re-let the property a couple of months later. Must it take a person to die? I am not trying to be smart. I know people this has happened to and it makes the families and local residents angry. Imagine living in a house for 30, 40 or 50 years and an empty house across the road gets fully retrofitted. We have seen this in Churchfield in Cork. The Minister promised retrofitting for Churchfield. That was reduced to retrofitting for Churchfield Avenue, which was then reduced to retrofitting for some houses in Churchfield. Is the Minister aware of how upset people living in Churchfield Avenue are when they look out their windows and see houses across the road being retrofitted while their homes are not being retrofitted?

I support planned and preventative maintenance and I want to see it succeed. Is there money available to local authorities right now to allow them to take on additional staff or contractors, both maintenance staff and administrators and engineers, to improve the quality of housing?