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

This is about building Ó Cualann-type housing at scale. To do this, I have increased the amount of money available from €25 million to €75 million, plus €25 million from the local authorities. Some of this money will be drawn down this year to meet the cost of site preparation works. I hope to see some affordable purchase homes accessed this year but we will certainly have affordable purchase scheme homes accessed next year.

On affordability and the Poolbeg development, taking into account the Rebuilding Ireland home loan scheme, the help-to-buy scheme and the affordable home purchase scheme, houses will be affordable. We will provide a maximum of €40,000 per home on a site and the local authority will then work out the land cost in that regard and, if determined to be €30,000, this would equate to a knock-down on the price of €70,000 which, depending on the area, would be quite significant. It could be more than that. Each local authority will have to do a study and decide what needs to be done. As a result of the knock-down price, the local authority will take an equity stake in the house with the person buying it, which will be resolved over a number of years but not in the first five years. As a result of this, we can then maintain a rolling fund to ensure we are always building affordable purchase homes to ensure that in the next economic crisis we will not have to shut down any provisions around affordability and so on. This is about Ó Cualann at scale. Cost rental is not as simple as some people try to make out. What one is trying to build into a cost rental scheme is a guarantee that the management costs, life cycle costs and build and maintenance costs will not be such that the type of cost inflation linked to rent increases will not have to be changed at any time in a future cycle.

See this speech in context