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

Developing the State landbank for housing is a key priority. Importantly, we have large sites in Dublin, Cork and other key urban areas where housing and homelessness pressures are greatest. We now have a good picture of all local authority residential lands and authorities have well-developed plans for many of their sites. This is backed by €6 billion in Exchequer funding, and significant progress is being made in ramping up the social housing programme. At the end of 2017, there were 13,400 social housing homes in the construction programme, up substantially on the 8,500 homes in the programme just a year earlier, and this continues to grow weekly.

In addition, the local authorities in Dublin are bringing forward major sites for mixed tenure development such as the 900 homes at Kilcarbery in Clondalkin, where procurement will be finalised in the autumn, and O’Devaney Gardens, a 600 unit site in the city council area where the procurement process is moving into the competitive dialogue stage and should be finalised in early 2019. Proposals for other key sites across Dublin are also being developed.

As I indicated in my reply to earlier questions, I have commenced the statutory provisions for the new affordable purchase scheme. Early indications from key local authorities have identified lands for 4,000 affordable homes and we are working to increase this ambition to 10,000 homes from local authority lands only. To support local authorities to get their sites ready for affordable housing, I am providing, via the serviced sites fund, increased funding of €75 million for enabling infrastructure. I will be inviting applications under the fund by the end of next week.

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