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

That is precisely why we have so many living in emergency accommodation. In 2014 the credit unions stated they wanted to invest in social housing. In 2016 their representatives appeared before the Oireachtas housing and homelessness committee to plead with us to put pressure on the Government to assist in that regard. In 2017 the Central Bank finally got around to approving credit union investment in social housing and all the Department has done is give a relatively small amount of money to the Irish Council for Social Housing to conduct a study of how to set up a special purpose vehicle. There are experts on how to do this in the Departments of Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform, while the Minister's own Department has experience of it. Are we going to have to wait another year before a special purpose vehicle is set up by the approved housing bodies? Are we going to have to wait another year before the credit unions have their own fund with which to invest? Would that mean funding would not be available until 2019 for credit unions to start building houses, which would mean that the houses would not have tenants in them until 2020 or 2021? What has the Minister been doing for the past year in implementing this specific recommendation, other than giving one third of the cost of a PricewaterhouseCoopers study which the Irish Council for Social Housing has been conducting of this matter? Now that the Central Bank has finally agreed to allow credit unions to invest, will the Minister get everyone around the table, namely, the Irish League of Credit Unions, the Credit Union Development Association, the approved housing bodies, the Department of Finance and the NTMA, to agree how this can be done in order that the €500 million which the Irish League of Credit Unions wants to invest can be invested this year, rather than at some distant point in the future?

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