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

First, we should have been building many more social houses than we were able to in recent years but people conveniently forget the storm Ireland has come through. We were borrowing money with a lot of conditions attached, which made it virtually impossible to be able to fund the kind of social housing building programme that was needed during those years. We now have an economy that is recovering and we can afford to spend a lot more money. We are ramping up dramatically to deliver social housing through a social housing building programme as well as an acquisitions programme, getting vacant properties back into use and all the rest of it. One can build houses through conventional building methods and there can be a need to go back to repair them if they are badly built. Standards are the issue here. The technology must deliver standards, whether that is pre-assembly in a factory setting or by traditional-build methods, and technology is moving on. As my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy English, said, there are steel-framed houses built with this technology in Dunshaughlin that are on sale today for more than €400,000. That is how houses are being built.

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