Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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I will be brief. I commend the Minister, the Department and the local authorities throughout the country. When the winter eviction ban ended, we were given a Doomsday scenario that families would be out on the street, and yet the Minister reacted, his staff reacted and local authorities reacted. We see the figures here today. It is great to hear all sides of the House acknowledge the success of this scheme.

The Minister has been extremely innovative. He has been willing to adapt and to change, and we have hard multiple examples there. We have seen it again this week, with the first home scheme, how the Minister has adapted now to self-builds. There is excellent work going on. Unfortunately, we do not hear it enough. There is great work being done. We have an awful lot more to do but it is great to see those figures - all bar four local authorities exceeding it. It is a real success story.

If I could give the Minister one point to take away for the tenantin situscheme, it is that all of them are precluded from buying out that house at any stage into the future. That is something the Minister could look at. Most of the people who have come through that scheme have been in that house for a long time. They will be restricted in the opportunity to buy a house at a future stage. They will stay in that house, probably for the rest of their lives. They should be afforded the opportunity of the tenant purchase scheme after the ten-year period that is currently afforded to local authority tenants.