Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This is the intriguing part of the debate and it is fundamental to the whole issue of housing and homelessness. I feel sorry for the Minister of State and I empathise with her entirely because she has inherited an impossible situation. I am not making a political point - it is simply a fact of life - but this problem had its origins approximately 12 years ago when a decision was taken not to replace the housing stock at local authority level and to do everything possible to shift from the local authority for reasons that I cannot understand. The private sector and Part V regulations and so on were supposed to resolve the housing problem, but they did not work. In fact, it failed miserably. Prior to that in Kildare, for example, approximately 300 houses per annum were being built and a further 400 local authority loans were offered to people who were in the income bracket between qualifying for a local authority house and the next level up. This amounted to effectively 1,000 houses per annum in the county. There are 8,500 people on the local authority housing list at the moment and it is rising all the time.

I read a commentary that included a suggestion from some economist that people would not go back to work because they would lose rent supplement. The reality is that the rent supplement is no good to people either at work or out of work. It makes no difference because the supplement is in lieu of local authority housing. Local authority housing was the bedrock on which a large sector of our population had depended in the past. Such people could aspire to owning an affordable house. Then affordable housing went out the window and everything went over to the investment sector. Unfortunately, that sector now controls the entire market. Deputy Ellis and others spoke earlier while I was in the Chair and I could not comment at that stage. However, the fact is that this is correct. It is not the problem of the Minister of State. She did not create the problem, she inherited it. Whether there is a will to resolve it will remain to be seen but I believe the Minister of State has the will to resolve the problem and she understands it.

It is at least three years since I visited the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government first, along with others, to focus on this particular issue. The point about housing is that we should plan at least six or seven years ahead and if we do not, then we have the kind of crisis that we have now.

I see the measures taken already as being helpful but they are only stopgap measures and will not resolve the problem. We need a major focus on a local authority or public sector house-building programme, a restoration of the local authority loans fund that was available previously to people to house themselves and the provision of local authority sites, as in the past. All these combined are likely to have a far more serious impact on the issue than anything that has been done so far.

Deputy Catherine Murphy raised a particular point on the economy. Up to 20,000 jobs per annum can accrue from a reinvigorated local authority house-building programme. The question is how to do it. How can this be done without upsetting the Government's balance sheet and keeping in line with what has been done to date? We cannot simply walk into the NAMA houses and declare that we own them and that we are going to take them back. That is like a shopkeeper going through his own till and deciding to pay himself out of it. It does not work that way. We need to find a means or formula to get past that and we should do so soon.

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