Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It does not mention vulture funds specifically, but it talks about those who will build large-scale rental property. Those are the vulture funds, the people who bought up land and property and own it. The most telling confirmation that my assessment of this is right came when I asked the Taoiseach earlier today if he could tell me how many local authority houses would be built under the plan. He frankly admitted that he could not give me an answer to that question. It is not in the plan. I have heard since from journalists, which I presume came from the Minister, and who I suspect, like everybody else, want to believe that this plan is a new departure. Everybody wants to believe that, while we all wanted to believe that Deputy Alan Kelly's plan was going to change things, but it did not.

The Taoiseach could not answer the question of how many council houses will be built, and neither can this report. The nearest it gets to answering the question is on page 45 where it states, "With cooperation and mobilisation by local authorities and AHBs, this Action Plan envisages a significant progressive increase in social housing build activity to over 5,000 ... a year by 2021." Let us read that carefully. It is not 5,000 a year to 2021. That would still only amount to 25,000 and it would not all be council because some of it would be from approved housing bodies. However, the Minister hopes to get up to 5,000 in 2021. Therefore, of the headline figure of 47,000 social housing units, which sounds good, fewer than 25,000 - in fact, I suspect it is considerably less - will be actual local authority houses.

In the time of the previous Government the housing list went from 96,000 to 140,000 families and households, and although we do not quite know what it is now, it is up by more than 45,000. If the rate of increase in the housing list continues, we will have a longer council housing list at the end of this plan than we currently have. That is because at the centre of its strategy, this plan does not envisage local authorities taking advice from the Housing Finance Agency and getting back to direct provision of large-scale local authority housing. Why are the figures not in it? Will the Minister tell me how many council houses will be built under this plan? The Taoiseach could not answer and I bet the Minister cannot do so either.

See this speech in context