Dr. Rory Hearne:

I thank members for their questions and comments, which we appreciate. We cannot answer them all directly but will try to give a response to some of the key questions.

From our perspective, the reason this research is so important and what it raises is the impact on families as a result of their exclusion from what we call the market in terms of the use of the housing assistance payment, HAP. They might get a house through the HAP in three or six months or two years' time but we found that there was an impact on their mental health and self-esteem as a result of trying to find private accommodation and being turned down and not getting replies from landlords. That was having a devastating impact on them and their children.

We are destroying them as human beings in this period. One day is too long in emergency accommodation. We should not accept, as a republic, that we are putting our citizens through this. In the analysis, we highlight there is a problem at the core of current housingpolicy, which is the over-emphasis of and over-reliance on the private rental market. We feel the balance is wrong. Deputy O'Dowd is right that HAP has a role. It can provide flexibility to people and it is very positive in terms of its ability to work when people are receiving it. The problem is policy is too skewed towards it. If we look at the Rebuilding Ireland plan, only 15% is to be newly constructed social housing. The rest is various private market and predominantly private rental accommodation. The problem is that it is exacerbating the housing crisis. This brings us back to the need to build. Rebuilding Ireland was welcome because it focused on the need for the State to do it. There is a general consensus now that the State has to get out and build social housing. There are a number of different ways it can do that. It can do it through local authorities which are increasing their role at the moment. We believe that should be the primary role and there should be increased capital. Deputy Ó Broin asked this question. There should be about €1.5 billion being spent right now for local authorities to build social housing. It is a question of priority. It would be a significant increase in budget. If we want to address the housing crisis, we should be building 10,000 social housing local authority units per year. On top of that, we should be building 20,000 affordable units. That could be done through a semi-State housing body, either an arm's length company from local authorities or, as the Nevin Economic Research Institute has proposed, a separate company.

The political system in the State does not have a sense of the scale of the crisis yet. The housing and homelessness crisis will get significantly worse unless the State intervenes. I have gone through the figures. Rebuilding Ireland is inadequate if we look at what is coming down the pipeline. I went through the first quarter figures for Rebuilding Ireland and in the four Dublin local authorities there are only 1,000 units on site at the moment and almost 2,000 further at various stages of planning. At the quickest, over three years about 3,000 new social housing units will be delivered in the greater Dublin area. It will not cover the new people who will become homeless in the next three years. With waiting lists of 40,000 people in the greater Dublin area, we are talking about 40 years at that rate before we address the waiting list. I highlight those figures because the scale of the response is required to meet the scale of the crisis. Land is really important because we have significant public land banks. We looked at the evidence on this approach by public-private partnerships in the past. The land has been advertised to developers; it is not just being developed by local authorities. There are ten sites in the greater Dublin area that are held by local authorities that on current plans will provide 3,000 social units and 7,000 private units. Why are we not building a majority of social housing units? Why are the local authorities not being supported to do that?

I can provide statistics on the question that was asked about value for money. Essentially what we are doing is giving between €500 million and €800 million to private landlords. It is housing people but it is not providing housing through the housing assistance payment, HAP. Over the 30-year period, that would provide 127,000 social housing units if the money was put into building rather than into the-----