Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yes. I have housing, education, Rosslare, the coalition, health, employment in the south east and climate change on my list so even with five minutes, it will be hard to do justice to all of the important questions that have been asked but I will do my best.

On affordable housing, I do not have a specific figure. What we usually do in the context of affordable housing is not so much to provide public money but public land on which affordable housing can be developed. The intention is to use public land for housing but not just for affordable, council or private housing, but a mix of both public and private in the interests of creating integrated communities. Some people would like us to go back to previous policies of building very large council-only housing estates similar to Ballymun, Jobstown or Wellview in my own constituency but I do not agree with that approach. It is better to have integrated communities which is why we will use public lands for mixed developments of private, public and affordable housing.

In terms of social housing, €6 billion has been allocated in Project Ireland 2040. We managed to increase the social housing stock by 7,000 last year. I acknowledge that this was done in lots of different ways. In some instances, local authorities built housing directly while in other cases they bought housing from developers or acquired it through Part V. In some cases, local authorities increased their stock through affordable housing bodies like Clúid Housing and the Iveagh Trust. As Deputies know, the latter has provided public housing in this city for decades. The social housing stock was also increased through the use of long-term leases. There are lots of ways in which we can expand our social housing stock. There is a very active but academic debate about statistics ongoing and I know that the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and Deputy Ó Broin love to debate those statistics. I have met and handed over keys to people in my own constituency in places like Waterville, where the council bought houses from a developer, Hansfield, where the council went into partnership with a developer, and Wellview, where the council built houses on its own land and none of the people taking those keys or living in those houses was terribly concerned about what mechanism was used to acquire that social housing. The people just wanted to live in a property that was owned by the council or, at the very least, leased by it on a very long-term basis and they wanted secure tenancy. I saw joy on the faces of people who had been in insecure tenancies or had been living in hotels who were moving into council owned or council leased house with secure tenancy. We can tie ourselves up in knots having very academic arguments about the exact mechanism used to expand our social housing stock but the most important thing is that it happens.

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