Mr. John McCarthy:

In overall terms, the ambition in respect of social housing is to deliver 50,000 units by 2021. It was 47,000 and it went up to 50,000 on foot of additional funding provided in budget 2018. This flows to some extent from the Oireachtas special committee report that was done in 2016 which referred to 50,000 as the level of ambition. Back in 2014, I think, or maybe it was early 2015, local authorities were given targets from 2015 to 2017 to be achieved. Now that the level of ambition has increased, the engagement the Deputy talks about - if he is referring to the engagement on television, I presume it was the one about five or six weeks ago - was around the targets for 2018 all the way to 2021 for each local authority to be delivered both by themselves or working in partnership with AHBs. We have told each local authority what its area is, the targets we have set and how we have broken down the targets in draft form. We have asked them to consider these. They are based on the latest housing needs assessment, the most recent of which was done in autumn of last year. Local authorities are now coming back to us on how they will deliver on that target. In the next few weeks we will finalise and publish those targets for each local authority.