Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I accept what Deputy Boyd Barrett said about the crisis in housing. It is one of the most extraordinary contradictions of our times that on the one hand we have people who cannot afford to buy a house, who are on rent supplement in privately owned houses, and at the same time we have acres of ghost estates. When the history of this period is written from a distance of objectivity, people will ask how a whole community got it so wrong. I would love to see those houses that are in NAMA converted into social housing, if that is possible, but I must honestly say to Deputy Boyd Barrett that it does not seem to make sense to build new houses at a time when we have an over-run of existing houses, irrespective of the ownership of those houses. The first step would be to look at how one could rationalise the oversupply and use the empty houses that are privately owned or are owned by NAMA and convert them into long-term sustainable social housing so that one does not have the distortions that exist. I will raise the points the Deputy raised with me with my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan.

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