Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I thank both local authorities for the presentations and all the data. I acknowledge the enormous work both our guests and their teams in both local authorities do on their housing and homeless brief. If that can be conveyed to the teams, certainly, on my party's behalf, I would appreciate that.

I will not ask lots of questions about figures because our heads are probably pickled at this stage but I will ask a few to help the committee get our head around the way in which the targets for affordable housing are determined and agreed. We had a briefing with the departmental officials on the housing need and demand assessment the other day and some of us left the meeting a little more confused about the operation of that tool than when we went into it.

The questions are general and I invite the local authority officials to explain in English as plain as possible how this works. It is all very well us having discussions around whether targets are being met or not, but how we determine the targets and whether they are sufficient to meet the need is an equally important question.

I am looking at both of the local authorities' housing delivery action plans as submitted to and agreed with the Department at the end of last year. For example, with respect to Galway, there is a table on page 7 of the plan that sets out the projected housing need and demand assessment, HNDA, need and affordability constraint each year up to 2026, and then the targets. This is no criticism of anybody in this room but I would say if anybody from Galway was reading that table, he or she would be scratching his or her head to determine that there is no affordability challenge in 2022, only 119 in 2023, etc.

Likewise, for example, the targets themselves are quite low. The HNDA seems to suggest Galway over the next five years has an affordability challenge of 551 households and there are targets set there for 1,005 units to be delivered between the local authority, LDA and AHBs. When I look at a similar table in Cork city's housing delivery action plan, given the size of the city and the constraints on cost for people who are renting or buying, there is only an affordability constraint of 1,700 households. The total target, when adding the local authority's, the LDA's and AHBs, is 1,700. I was hoping both local authorities could explain how is that figure derived in terms of the affordability test and how do we go from that to the actual targets because it looks like Galway has doubled the target from the need to the delivery whereas it looks like Cork has simply taken the HNDA and mapped that against the targets. Maybe both local authorities could enlighten us on that.