Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In the budget 2015 statement, the Government committed a significant amount of capital financing to a new housing programme, which is one of the biggest ever launched in the history of this country. The Deputy is correct in saying that it is not possible to plan, design, build, fit out and hand keys over for houses within a short period.

Anybody with experience of house building will know that. I am glad the Deputy acknowledges that implementing this extremely ambitious programme will take time.

There were several elements to the Minister's proposals for 2015. The first and most significant was to deal with the scandal that various Deputies in the House have raised from time to time, namely, the boarding up of perfectly good houses and apartments by local authorities when the tenancies were given up, particularly in the Dublin area. These houses were left to languish for up to two years, and even three in some cases, before being refurbished and handed over to new tenants. The first part of the strategy is to bring all available units up to a certain standard and hand them over to tenants, both families and individuals, who are waiting on accommodation.

The second part is to provide finance in this regard, and that is what the budget set out to do. Providing the budget finance is the core part of the strategy. The Deputy spoke as if she disapproved of assisting with the direct financing, through borrowing by the State, through off-balance-sheet borrowing. If the Deputy were to examine the facilitation of this, she might think again. In every country in Europe with a successful house-building programme, a variety of avenues are used, including local authorities, housing agencies, housing organisations and co-operatives. Financing is directly through the state, as in our case and as reflected in the Budget Statement, but it also involves borrowing from other institutions and borrowing through off-balance-sheet mechanisms. I do not believe there is any difficulty with any of that. I wonder why the Deputy sounds so disapproving with regard to obtaining additional finance to build the houses she claims she and her party are committed to building. Unless one has the finance to build the houses, one will not even get to the starting point.

The Minister has been meeting local authority representatives regularly up and down the country. If the Deputy wishes, I will get a detailed response from the Minister on all the meetings he has had. He meets the Dublin local authority officials on a weekly basis to be updated on the figures for Dublin. The Dublin managers have produced quite a detailed map, which the Deputy, as a Dublin Deputy, might have seen. It highlights where additional housing is to be provided, where sites are ready to go, and where sites are zoned and serviced. Also mapped are sites where all that work would have to be done.

Since the programme was launched, the Minister has probably done far more work than has been done by any Minister in recent years to get the greatest housing programme in the State under way and have housing delivered, from this year on, to the people on the housing list who need homes.

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