Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

If the Deputy meant something different, he should have specified something different because this is entirely woolly and general. It is very disappointing.

At the beginning of 2012, I moved into what was then called the Department of the Environment, Planning and Local Government. We had no money whatsoever following the collapse of the economy. The construction-led boom left houses in places where nobody wanted to live. One of the big jobs I had when I came into that Department was to deal with ghost estates. I chaired a committee in the Custom House where there were representatives of various bodies, including the construction industry, etc. We had to deal with houses nobody wanted to live in because they were built in places where there were tax breaks and in counties where there were too many houses. The local authorities had been starved of funding. They had been taken out of the construction business and the private market was providing the rented houses to meet the social need. That was what we inherited. We had no money to spend because of the troika and the bank guarantee, and the State was trying to deal with the mess it had inherited. We were dealing with budgets where we literally did not have any money to spend on houses. The only thing I could think of doing at the time was to use the small sum of money that I could scrape together to set up a void scheme. The current Government has continued that and something like 7,000 or maybe more-----

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