Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The housing crisis has been developing and, indeed, escalating since about 2011. It is interesting that there has been approximately a 400% increase in the number of families sleeping in emergency or temporary accommodation for the homeless since October 2014. That is a rise from 800 families in that situation to 2,177 in 2016.

In 2012, we only had an average of eight new families presenting as homeless in Dublin every month, but that rose to 40 families per month in 2014, and has risen to 70 per month in the first half of this year. Clearly, therefore, the situation is getting worse year after year. For far too long the last government denied the existence of a crisis and only belatedly declared it a national emergency. It published many strategies which were lacking in detail, implementation and execution in terms of their impact on building new houses. For example, fewer than 274 new social houses were constructed in 2015, and only 28 of those were directly built by local authorities.

The Committee on Housing and Homelessness, chaired by Deputy John Curran, did a lot of good cross-party work in coming up with solutions. The Minister has announced his response today. My key question to the Taoiseach concerns the execution, administrative and statutory capacity to deliver the scale of houses required to meet the challenges. Very few council houses were built by councils in 2015 and 2016, to date, yet we are now looking in the plan at up to 47,000 new social houses. One must question the current capacity of the system to deliver that number.

Is it not the case that a separate statutory institution or agency is required with wide-ranging powers to drive home house-building and deal with what is, by any yardstick, a national emergency?

Anybody who listened in this morning to "Morning Ireland" will have heard that we have had children living in hotels in Dublin in recent years, the impact of which on families, mothers, fathers and children was eloquently and graphically articulated. It is a true blight on our society. Notwithstanding all the strategies in the world that we publish, I am concerned about the capacity to execute delivery of this plan. Is the Taoiseach satisfied that the statutory administrative capacity to deliver it exists?

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