Mr. Niall Cussen:

I thank the Chairman for the opportunity to speak to the committee. As my colleague, Ms Nic Aongusa, highlighted, our Department has been engaging with a number of local authorities in the Dublin area for some time, prior to the development of the rental strategy, with a view to identifying sites that have capability of delivering extra supply more generally and for the rental sector specifically. From our engagement with Dublin City Council alone, we are very confident that the 1,000 units which were indicated in the rental strategy for progression in January and can and will be developed once the relevant masterplanning, development, consent, planning permission, procurement and delivery actions are secured. We are making good progress on that front. For example, in the O'Devaney Gardens regeneration project alone, there is very close, almost fortnightly, engagement between the Department's officials and Dublin City Council's officials - indeed, they are combined on a joint project board - to develop a mixed tenure housing project inclusive of both new rental accommodation, social housing and so on, which will deliver probably in excess of 700 homes, in that strategic and regenerating part of the city with a view to starting dates of, I suppose, 2017 into 2018.

That is not the only project. Running closely in tandem with the O'Devaney Gardens project is the wider Dublin City Council residential lands initiative which, as members may be aware, includes sites at Oscar Traynor Road, potential sites in St. Michael's Estate and others which are well able to deliver the balance of 1,000 units identified in the rental strategy. We are very confident about the availability of sites capable of delivering the 1,000 units identified in the rental strategy. That is not at issue at all. We are very focused on the wider wave of supply, particularly in regard to potential rental sector specific developments both on other local authority lands and privately owned lands. There are local authority masterplanning exercises under way on, for example, sites in Corkagh Grange in the South Dublin County Council area, Donabate in the Fingal County Council area and we have other potential candidate sites in that context. Rental supply will be a very strong possibility within that.

Within Dublin city centre, where there is acute pressure in the rental sector, we have 500 apartments under construction on a mix of development sites in the docklands area, in particular.

It is very visible there with projects such as Capital Dock, Dublin Landings and so on.

Members will also be aware that over 3,000 units are proposed for the Poolbeg west strategic development zone planning scheme which is out for public consultation at the moment. It is very likely that a considerable amount of the product on that site will be for the rental sector. Major development works have commenced on the Cherrywood strategic development zone. The town centre element of that will probably Ireland's biggest and first build-to-rent project with more than 1,300 units. These are all physical manifestations of the Rebuilding Ireland initiative and the actions taking place under the rental strand of that are actually having an effect on the ground.

Within the wider whole of Government approach as published on the Rebuilding Ireland website, action is under way to secure early delivery of 23 major urban housing development sites, MUHDS - I will let members pronounce the acronym themselves. Additional rental sector supply is therefore very likely over the short to medium term, as evidenced, for example, in the recent sharp increase in the number of active sites recorded by the Dublin housing supply and co-ordination taskforce. We have some preliminary figures that have not yet been published. At the last interval we had 126 active sites producing about 4,000 to 4,500 homes in the Dublin area alone. That has jumped quite significantly to 145 in the last quarter of 2016, which reflects a broader buoyancy regarding patterns of planning applications, commencements and so on, particularly for apartment developments for which viability seems to be recovering quite strongly now, particularly in the high-demand locations.

As the Minister and officials have said, in the context of dealing with the various different strands of our current housing difficulties, boosting supply is at the core of solving the problem in the long run. It is coming on stream. We have also had a very significant increase in overall completions in 2016 compared with previous years. We have also had a very significant increase in overall completions in 2016 compared with previous years. Our sense would be that we are on track to achieve the target of 25,000 homes by 2020 or 2021 in the context of Rebuilding Ireland. We have more to come on that with the local infrastructure housing activation funding. These are all strands of Rebuilding Ireland in which the team in the Department is heavily engaged at the moment, as are the local authorities.