Barry Cowen (Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I know it is difficult for the Minister to bring forward meaningful plans and strategies and efforts to address this crisis. The first thing he could do is to declare an emergency, because that is what it is and has been. That is what this Government needs to recognise in the first instance. An all-party committee has been meeting for the last number of weeks and has another few weeks to go. It will be making recommendations to the Minister within his first 100 days in office with a view to formulating much of what will come from that. The Minister talked about the 2020 strategy, which the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, launched over two years ago, and about the great foundations he laid and the great progress that was made. No progress was made - it was one of the greatest failures and disasters of the last Government. Progress on the provision of housing and addressing the homelessness situation has been a non-event. It has been an absolute and total disaster. Has there been any analysis of the failures and the reasons it has been such an abject failure? That should be the Minister's first port of call before he moves on to the next stage. The Department had eight stages of approval from the day the site was selected until a shovel arrived on the site and construction began. That took two years. The Department told me in recent weeks that it has cut that down to four stages, as the Minister mentioned, but that happened early in 2015 and we still have not seen the sort of progress we would expect. Even four stages are not sufficient.

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