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

It is a case of using the best available technology to get houses built as quickly as we can to try to meet the demand for social housing. It is as simple as that.

If one looks at the reasons that the rapid-build programme has stalled and is taking longer than some had hoped, one can point to procurement, for example. It has taken the Office of Government Procurement some time to get the framework in place. We had hoped that would be done by the middle of summer 2016 but it is only being done now. There are reasons for that. Let us face it; there have also been protests. There was a lot of local resistance to a number of sites because of the kind of fears we have heard today, namely, that the houses would blow over in the next storm. That is not the case, but they were the fears expressed. There have also been some planning issues in terms of trying to progress the programme because of the suspicion around rapid build and whether it could offer the kind of quality we need, among other issues. We have moved on from much of that now. From a procurement point of view, we have clarity and speed, and from a Part 8 point of view, all of the 350 or so houses that will be at various stages of progress by the end of the year will have achieved planning permission and will have funding signed off and the work will be progressing.

I do not think that this is any more expensive than building so-called conventional houses. When one looks at the price in Poppintree, for example, when the final costs came in, it was not as high as many had predicted. There was a robust negotiation with the developer on that.

There was a very pointed question about what the houses would be used for, which is a very fair question. When we ramped up the numbers to go from 500 to 1,500, clearly this was about social housing provision as well as emergency accommodation.

My preference is that homeless people should be a priority in this context but when we are talking about the numbers I suspect we will deliver in the coming years from rapid build and of the tens of thousands of social houses we may build in the future, we may find that this technology becomes the norm, both in the private sector and in social housing build programmes. It would be wrong to say that all of these units will be for temporary emergency accommodation. That is unlikely in reality.

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