Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I agree absolutely with a lot of what Deputy Mick Wallace said. It is simple to rejig local authorities back into providing housing because that capacity was hollowed out of them for the past ten years. I spoke to housing officers, including those in our county. There was an annual trawl to find the correct sites and make sure they were serviced. There were a number of local authority estates to be built and so on. All of this evaporated, but we are putting it back in place. One of the first things I did last year was to remove any embargo on the hiring of key people at local authority level in order to do that. Change will not be instant, but once things are back in shape local authorities will be a very regular provider of social housing.

We are examining a variety of ways to deal with the issue, including but not limited to direct capital investment. There is no shortage of money. Rather, the problem is having the money spent on bricks to build houses. As the Deputy said, we also have PPPs to supplement this and I have devoted a special purpose vehicle, with a total figure of €400 million from the sale of BGE, for social housing. We are developing ways to utilise this and ongoing discussions with the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government are taking place.

On fiscal rules, they are in place for a purpose, namely, to stop countries being profligate and destroying their economies by not having prudent expenditure profiles into the future. In a way, the Deputies are correct. The rules have yet to bed down and have to be tweaked and examined. Whoever is in government after the next general election will have a job of work to do to address that issue. We have already made submissions to the Commission on infrastructural needs that might be excluded from the fiscal space calculations. It is a dramatic work in progress.

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