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

It is not the first time the Deputy and I have had this engagement. I will make a number of comments. The Deputy is right on one aspect. We do have a social housing emergency and we are dealing with it in a way that is multifaceted.

We are encouraging and inviting private investment to solve the problem, as well as committing billions of euro of public money to solve it.

The difference between the Deputy and I is that he does not like the fact that anybody may be able to make a profit on the back of solving or helping to solve a problem. He only wants the State to be involved in social housing and nobody else. The problem with that strategy is that he is expecting the State to do all the heavy lifting. What we have is a policy which is about encouraging private sector investment in social housing solutions, as well as complementing massive public sector investment.

We have to continue the trend. Last year, we delivered three times as many social houses as were delivered the previous year. Next year, we will have to deliver three times again. We will have to keep building until we get close to 10,000 units a year being delivered into social housing outcomes to ensure we deal with the scale of the problem.

The Deputy knows that, while we are gearing up to that, we must have a significant reliance on the private rental market, which he also always keeps criticising. The Deputy's solution, however, is not deliverable overnight. It takes time to dramatically scale up the delivery of social housing by the State, approved housing bodies and the private sector. We are looking at different ways of ensuring that when one combines those different approaches, one gets a massive response in terms of delivering new social housing solutions. This is what we are about because of the scale of the problem and the fact that for nearly ten years we did not have the resources to be able to put into social housing. This, in turn, created an extraordinary demand, particularly in Dublin city but also in other places.

The Deputy should not simply pick one element of the solution and ditch it for some ideological reason because he does not like to see somebody investing in solutions on the back of getting a modest return on it. Part of the solution is about getting families into decent homes in which they know they have security of tenure for long periods and out of the pressurised situations in which many of them find themselves today.

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