Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the work the committee did. I believe it was a very worthwhile exercise. The Social Democrats would have liked to have participated on the committee but unfortunately places were limited. However, we made a submission. The area of housing and the homelessness crisis has been a priority for us since our party was founded a year ago. We produced a policy paper on the issue as our contribution because there is not just one solution but a range of different solutions to resolving this.

I note many of the committee's recommendations, including the one on procurement, which seems to be around local authorities and housing associations. We go in quite a different way from that in our proposal. The current regime has two strands. There is the Housing Agency to gather statistics and, separately, there is the Housing Finance Agency. We believe a third strand is necessary, which is the project management side of it. We have proposed a national housing delivery agency comprised of those three strands being pulled together.

The delivery agency would look at projects in their totality. For example, it would identify sites that are large enough - it would not be the case in every part of the country - to facilitate the development of a healthy, social mixture of tenure, size of unit and so on. The project management on the site would include local authority housing, the voluntary housing sector and also the private sector. The only way we are going to get the mix we need is to have all those elements. I do not want to see 3,000 local authority houses on one site.

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