Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Department and the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Coveney, have a difficulty with numbers. The Minister does not now how many people will sleep in emergency accommodation tonight nor how many new builds are under construction. There are not 10,000 social housing units in the pipeline. I have examined the figures very carefully. In my constituency, a third of the units listed do not exist, are not in pre-planning and are never going to happen. The Department and the housing managers know that to be the case. If, as I suspect, the status of a third of units in my constituency is replicated across the entire 10,000 units, that they are in the pipeline means that a civil servant put them on a piece of paper and nothing more than that. The Department needs to become more honest in regard to the figures it publishes.

In regard to the substantive query, the real issue is that there should be a single stage process. The Department is delaying the construction of social housing from 18 to 24 months. The Government was able to rush through emergency legislation to assist big developers of private housing developments of 100 units or more. It must reform the four stage process, make it one stage and take the leash off the local authorities so they can build the houses that people need.

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