Catherine Byrne (Dublin South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is nothing so sad as a young couple with young children coming to one's clinic to say that they have been given one month to move out of their home when the girl has lost her job and they cannot afford to pay the mortgage. We need to sit up and listen and learn from what has happened in the past.

Other speakers, including the Minister, have spoken about building social housing for the future but the need is here and now. We need to reach the target as soon as possible. I welcome the fact that €3.5 billion has been set aside for building new social housing under the social housing strategy for 2020.

When I was growing up in my area I witnessed the first sod being turned on the new St. Michael's estate. There was great excitement because there were large numbers of people on the housing list at the time. St. Michael's estate and Ballymun were the new way to live. Sadly, later on, they had to be knocked for a number of reasons but at one time they had accommodated large numbers of people.

If the Government is to succeed in building social housing we cannot go back to building hundreds of social housing units in vast land blocks which the local authorities cannot manage properly. This is one of my concerns. Smaller sites should be made available throughout the city and the country to build small groups of houses. This system worked very well for voluntary housing groups which provide housing for people on small sites which are properly maintained.

In the past the council employed a large force of maintenance workers but now there is hardly a plumber or a carpenter available in any of the areas around the city. This is one of the reasons so many social housing units were left unoccupied and could not be re-allocated in a timely manner.

In one housing estate in my constituency, at one time 100% of the houses were owned by the local authority but now fewer than 25% of those properties are owned by the city council. This creates difficulties because there are fewer social housing units being re-allocated in the system. However, it has given an opportunity to 75% of the people to buy their homes. Sadly it is the case today that many social housing tenants are living in flats complexes where they have lived almost all their lives, for 50 years in some cases, and they have not had the opportunity to buy their own homes.

I thank Fianna Fáil for bringing this important issue to the floor of the House. It has been discussed here on many occasions. There is a huge mountain to climb in this regard but I believe that we have made a good start. The Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, and the Minister of State, Deputy Paudie Coffey, will do their best. In a time when we had plenty of money we should have been building proper social housing which was properly managed and properly maintained but that did not happen.

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