Barry Cowen (Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Now that Fine Gael has allowed the Taoiseach six weeks to make up his mind, perhaps we can get back to priorities and the issues that affect people's daily lives. In the aftermath of Storm Doris, the ESB is working hard to ensure that people have power restored to their homes. We wish it well in that task.

What I want to deal with briefly is people who, unfortunately, do not have homes. I am conscious that there have been many announcements and plans to deal with the challenges facing the housing sector. We gave the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Development, who had the best of intentions and who engaged in a wide-ranging consultative process involving stakeholders - which was fed into by an Oireachtas committee - time and space. We allowed some time to see if what was envisaged could be implemented. Considering the abject failure of the previous plan under the same people in Government, it was always going to be about implementation and we wished it well. It is time that we begin to engage in an honest appraisal of what is being delivered. Records continue to be set in the context of the number of people who are homeless, the cost of rent and the gamut of factors associated with the housing construction sector and the provision of housing. On Monday, Focus Ireland showed that last month a child became homeless every five hours. That is a shameful statistic. We in this House are obliged to seek to remove whatever obstacles are preventing the implementation of any plans that are envisaged. On Tuesday, the Taoiseach waxed lyrical about the fact over 8,500 units are under construction at present.

I lost my head trying to point out to him that this was not true. I do not want to be losing my cool but we have to impart the frustration felt by those who come into my clinic and the clinic of every other Member to the Members in government. Of those units he referenced, only 1,829 are under construction, the rest are going through various stages of the process and the majority were approved more than two years ago. A total of 652 units is all that was built last year. By 2020 the majority of the houses we are talking about will not be built and, at best, the 8,500 units will be built. Many local authorities did not build any houses last year.

The Government seems to be obsessed with announcements in the hope that they will bamboozle people with volumes of details so that they will not see what is going on, but we all are quite aware that progress is not being made.

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