Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

No one will benefit from a short-term or short-sighted approach to this problem. We need a coherent and multifaceted plan that will encompass several Departments. There are people in third level institutions such as the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, NUIM, and the Dublin Institute of Technology, DIT, who are doing excellent work on this matter and have written widely on it. Essentially, it seems that we are employing a piecemeal approach to what will continue to be a crisis, unless we develop a vision and a plan for the future. There is no one working in one in four households and we have an army of people who could be described as being working poor. Purchasing houses is not going to be an option for many of them. Given his political and professional background, I ask the Minister to see to it that the Government draws on the expertise to which I refer in order that we might develop a multifaceted model for the housing and construction sectors that will include an input from the necessary Departments. We should discontinue the piecemeal approach which obtains and which is going to give rise to further difficulties, including a number of significant social problems.

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