Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy has just confirmed the position. The initiatives in which he was engaged were to encourage, in so far as he was engaged in them, Kildare County Council to take up a responsibility for individuals who were clearly in need of housing and to engage with the trust that sought to deal with these issues. He has made exactly that point. Why did the Deputy so deal with the matter? He did so because he knew it was not the responsibility of the Department of Defence, nor appropriate to the Department, to so deal with matters. I would welcome further engagement from Kildare County Council, with which my Department has engaged with regard to over-holders. We seek to do what we can in that regard.

The Deputy has just established the truth of what I said. Any action he took when his party was in government was not to urge my predecessors to take on this responsibility but to seek engagement from the local authority. I would welcome such engagement but we all know that due to the fact that the economy got into difficulties and the Deputy's party in government destroyed the public finances, the amount of funding available to local authorities to meet accommodation and housing needs across the community - not only among former members of the Defence Forces - is terribly limited, unfortunately. I wish there were more funding. Perhaps if there had been greater economic intelligence in government in the years between 2000 and 2011, we would not have found ourselves in this position and we would have the type of public authority housing building programme that all of us in the Government would like to see, rather than engagement in this sort of cynical play-acting in the House.

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