Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance)
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I do not know how much of it we are doing because the emphasis seems to be on getting units back into use for the people who own them. Councils are buying houses on the open market and I do not have a problem with that because there is an emergency and it has to be done but we all know that is not a sensible policy in the long term because it means buying houses at top dollar when they could be built.

I refer to an affordable mortgage scheme. I would have thought that Fine Gael, as the party of the home owner and so on, would be interested in this but there seems to be very little interest. Will councils be encouraged to have an affordable mortgage scheme? We have often debated this mixed tenure policy, which sounds great in theory. I live in a mixed tenure estate of 720 units that was built by Fingal County Council in the early 2000s with a private developer. Of those, 200 were sold on the private market, 400 were sold as affordable mortgage units and about 100 were for council tenants and consequently, there is a range of incomes in the estate. There are teachers, nurses, manual labourers and all sorts of people. If an affordable mortgage scheme was in place the councils could build estates in which some units could be for social housing and others could be for affordable mortgages for those who do not qualify for social housing but cannot buy a house on the open market. I wonder why there apparently is so little enthusiasm for doing that because it used to be something councils did routinely.

On the section on water, yesterday afternoon this issue seemed headed towards a resolution, in that the committee which had been set up by the Dáil to look into it seemed to be reaching some kind of consensus that water charges should be abolished, people should get refunds -----