Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As opposed to making a contribution to the solution, he was just screaming and shouting, as usual.

The issue for Dún Laoghaire or for anywhere else is that its local authority decides how many social houses it wants to deliver and then we will pay for them. We want to work with local authorities to ramp up social housing delivery dramatically. I made that very clear when I was in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. My understanding, according to a figure I got the other day, is that an extra 222 will be delivered by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown by January 2018, which is in just over one year. We can go through the detail of that if we get the detail from the local authority.

My only objective is to increase significantly the number of social houses owned, built, acquired or altered to make them suitable for good quality social housing, preferably in mixed tenure estates. We will encourage that and spend a lot of money to deliver it. That is why we are talking about these kinds of figures, with 18,700 to be delivered through construction, PPPs, voids, regeneration, rapid build and Part V acquisitions. Part V is not leasing; it is acquisitions. There are other leasing projects we can do that make sense, for example, leasing for between ten and 20 years to give people certainty and security of tenure. Although the Deputy might not like to hear it because it does not suit the political arguments, the Government is committed to delivering tens of thousands of extra social houses over the next five years.

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