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

I welcome today's action plan for housing and homelessness. We all will agree it is long overdue. In the previous Dáil, many of us could see that there was a housing infrastructure deficit. In my own area, I began to see functioning families at risk of becoming homeless in the period 2012-13 because there was a big construction projection, which was welcome at the time but which exposed a significant deficit. At that stage, we were seeing families - I had some in my area - that were sleeping in cars.

Throughout the term of the previous Government, there was an inability to listen, even to practical steps that were proposed. The committee of which I was a member, the Joint Committee on Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht, invited all the housing agencies to hearings in early 2013. Even at that point, we made a proposal that European Investment Bank funding would be leveraged. It is disappointing that much of that advice was not taken up. Therefore, it is a crisis that partly could have been avoided.

I have briefly gone through the 117 pages of the document and I will devote a good deal more time over the summer to get more familiar with it. Certainly, the detail of some of the initiatives will need to be discussed further by us.

The Social Democrats published a housing document and there is a section included in our manifesto. We are very happy to see some aspects of what has emerged today. We sought the establishment of a housing delivery agency and I note that there is a procurement section devoted to local authorities in the Minister's Department. We will wait to see how it works, but it certainly has possibilities. The idea that a housing agency can have a procurement function is important, although it is not quite what we sought. The procurement aspect is important.

A couple of years ago we spoke about €3.1 billion being available like monopoly money. It was trotted out time and again, but it did not deliver a result. We cannot have the figure of €5.33 billion doing the same rounds; it must be more than just a figure that is spoken about. There must be practical action. There are some practical measures included in the document and it will be important for us to see how they play out.

There is a language issue. I heard it on the news again tonight that there will be the delivery of 47,000 houses. Those on the periphery will presume this means the building of 47,000 houses, but, of course, that is not what it means. It is very important that we say what will happen. Some of them will be provided under the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme-----

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