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

The Deputy is right that this is all about delivery. I have said on numerous occasions that if I come to the conclusion that local authorities are not able to deliver social housing at the pace we need it, we then need to look at new structures, such as a national housing authority or something like that.

At the moment, to be fair, the vast majority of local authorities are seriously ramping up their delivery programmes. We should not forget there was virtually no money for social housing for quite some time because the country had no money. We did not have the capacity to borrow money to spend on social housing because there were strings attached to how we sourced finance. We are no longer in that position. We have an obligation to increase our housing stock significantly. I intend doing that as fast as we can while ensuring we have good-quality social housing. That is why we significantly increased funding this year over last year. We have seen a 50% increase in housing funding in one year. We will see another dramatic increase next year and the year after. We are ramping up. It takes time to get sites that were dormant up and running and building through tendering processes and all the rest of it. However, that is very much under way now.

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