Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Minister to give us more information, perhaps by way of a further written note. Both the Minister and I represent Dublin constituencies and we are both familiar with the housing situation. Having the provision of 1,500 houses in the Dublin area slowed down is basically holing the housing programme below the waterline with a huge hole. This is the difficulty.

The Minister implied, wrongly, that my colleague, Deputy Howlin, was avid for PPPs. The reason is that in that era, as the Minister knows well, the Government could not raise tuppence anywhere because we inherited a situation in 2011 where our credit had been destroyed and the Government was constrained by the troika, under an agreement with the previous Government, to very difficult terms and conditions. However, we are in a different era now. We have financial capacity. I do not understand why the Minister is not looking at both the good elements potentially of PPPs and particularly many of their disastrous features.

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