John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government recently published a social housing construction programme which sets out, scheme by scheme and stage by stage, each of the social housing projects. It is very clear from the programme that it will be several years before significant numbers of properties will be complete and ready for occupation yet every month we see figures for homelessness continue to increase.

The programme for Government states,"The Action Plan will look at existing housing stock that is uninhabited, and vacant commercial units, with a view to incentivising the refurbishment and change of use to homes." As the construction programme is under way in 2017 and 2018, can ambitious targets be brought forward in these areas to bring some of the very many unoccupied units back into use to help address the homelessness problem?

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