Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

Regarding the 10,000 affordable houses, some of these units are already under construction, although I readily accept there are not enough. The State must first seek the lands and must not interfere with the separate social housing programme on which a vast amount of money is being spent. In many cases the land given by the State must be properly serviced and must go through the formal planning process. It is a slow process, but at meetings aimed at trying to interest them in social housing initiatives and to speed up the process of providing such housing, private developers have told me that it takes six and a half years to build a house from the time they purchase a site until the house is finished, even when they do not encounter much difficulty. That is the difficulty with which we are faced. However, many of the available sites are open green field sites and it should be possible to increase the pace in regard to these.

Deputy Rabbitte is probably aware of some initiatives that could speed up these projects but I am not sure they would win total acceptance. They involve trying to get local authorities and the group working on this problem to examine the possibility of using lands zoned for amenity and other uses but not being used for those purposes. If that could be done quickly it would speed up not only social housing projects but those for affordable housing.

I have stated that these issues must be discussed with local authorities because if Government were to act in isolation it would create problems with development plans. Genuine efforts are being made by many of the people involved in this area to come up with imaginative ways of speeding up the process which, I accept, is too slow. It takes far too much time to get a project up and running from the time a site is identified, even if the conveyancing and transfer of land are quickly dealt with. To speed up matters there is a need for some form of private sector involvement with regulations regarding land prices. There are ways in which we could improve matters without affecting the resources going into social housing.

Regarding the community employment scheme, everybody wants to keep the maximum number of people in the schemes. The figure has been fixed for last year and this year. There are issues regarding the phasing out of some of the schemes and the pressure that puts on the system. Both the Tánaiste and the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Martin, are involved in discussions on that and on the issue of people over the age of 55 years who are unlikely to return to the normal labour market but who are doing good social work involving social schemes. The Minister must come to his own conclusions when he completes his Estimates in the next few weeks.

For many years I have argued for the enhancement and development of State companies to be as efficient as they possibly can be and to give good employment. We must not endeavour to turn them into organisations where it is a race to the bottom in terms of salaries and standards. There are different ways of achieving efficiencies in State companies and some have been turned around into better operations. In my capacity in a number of ministries and as Taoiseach, my line has been that these issues must be resolved in discussions with workers' representatives. I have been involved in discussions over the years with companies from B+I Line to hospital boards and companies which moved out of State hands.

The report on Aer Lingus is now available and the Cabinet will discuss it over the next few weeks.

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