Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Funding was not necessarily the problem when it came to a number of projects under the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF 1. LIHAF can be a complicated way of achieving what is a very important goal because it requires the local authority to work with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government and in some instances to also work with a number of different owners of land to make sure we can get the best number of units onto a site and the site open as quickly as possible, get all the supporting infrastructure in place and arrive at affordable prices for the housing as well. It can be a complex thing to put together and that is what we saw in the course of this first phase of LIHAF, that there were some delays that were not initially anticipated, but we have learnt a lot from LIHAF 1. It is a new model of funding for getting a significant number of houses built over a shorter period, which we now seek to progress, not just through LIHAF 2 but through other schemes that might come on stream in the future. There will not be any unnecessary delays with the Department for LIHAF 2 in the call for proposals that will issue in March because a huge amount has been learnt in recent months since the original call went out. A number of projects that were submitted were not successful and some of them will be resubmitted because progress will have been made with work by local authorities on the sites so we expect to be able to turn them around quite quickly and to sign agreements over the course of the second half of the year.

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