Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 26 October 2023

Public Accounts Committee

Appropriation Accounts 2022
Vote 34 - Housing, Local Government and Heritage
2021 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General
Chapter 3: Central Government Funding of Local Authorities
Chapter 4: Accountability of the Central Funding of Local Authorities.

9:30 am

Mr. Graham Doyle:

We now have the modern methods of construction roadmap to allow standardisation to feed in to houses being constructed off-site. This is much easier for local authority social housing purposes.

I want to come back to the Cathaoirleach's original question and address one of the key points here. If we give a local authority a large greenfield site that extends as far as the eye can see and instruct the local authority to construct 9,000 social housing units, that is no problem. It can be done, but it will bring up all kinds of issues that nobody wants to deal with. It is an extreme example but it illustrates my point.