Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Mr. Graham, I do not wish to revisit that. I know Housing for All and inasmuch as delivery overseen by Ms Timmons and Ms Stapleton is happening, I am not questioning that. I want us to look back to see how we stop this happening again. A demographic bulge was coming at us; that was clear. Sites were available but key tools were needed, capital being one of them. The second one mentioned was the idea of social mix and how we were only able to deliver social housing. The third one was that some of these sites were acquired where there was no demand. Yet, of the 13,000 people who are in emergency accommodation, if you offered them homes in the a-hole of nothing, as was referenced earlier, they would take the option and they would consider it. That is my point. When we did value-for-money audits in 2018 and 2019 on local authority sites that came from Dublin City Council and other areas, local authorities were jumping through hoops to see if a site was value for money. Yet, we are spending €317 million this year alone on emergency accommodation. There was a major failure by the State over a ten-year period to construct homes, to predict a demographic bulge, to provide capital and to provide any value for money at all to the taxpayer. This is because of the significant costs of emergency accommodation. I have not heard any learning of that lesson in this room. I have not heard of any methods to prevent those significant decisions. It could be at a political level; I am not saying it is not. Where is the structural change taking place to prevent that from happening again?