Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The overall housing budget will remain more or less as it was last year, but that is across different functions. The extra €30 million will be added onto the capital budget for construction, which had been steadily dropping over the past few years. All capital budgets have been declining significantly but we expect to have an additional 500 new units from the construction stimulus package. Part of that will be in construction and the Deputy will know that it takes some time to build new houses. Part of it will be bringing voids back into use. We have information from various local authorities that they have voids which need significant work. There was a previous scheme which addressed some of the voids, but others require significant work, so we intend to use a large portion of that money to bring those back into use.

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