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

Deputy Hogan is not stopping me from building houses either. Unfortunately, what stopped us from building houses over the last number of years was the Celtic tiger boom and bust during which, despite the fact that a very large number of private houses were built, the local authority house building programme was not enormous. Later it was seriously constrained by the agreement with the troika whereby capital funding had to be cut back year on year.

We have turned the corner and are in recovery, which is why we are beginning again to construct local authority housing and I intend to ensure we continue with this. I accept what the Deputy has said in terms of need, but, unfortunately, we inherited the situation as it was and we are only now beginning to get back to construction. For that reason, we are using whatever methods we can, including NAMA units, leasing, the RAS and all of the other methods, to house people.

One of the more positive programmes this year will be the voids programme, a programme for dealing with void or empty local authority housing that can be brought back into use. We also want to encourage local authorities to turn around their empty houses as quickly as possible. Some are much better than others at placing new occupants in houses as soon as they are vacated.

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