Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The lack of honesty in the Government's approach and its failure to acknowledge the fact they have failed miserably to deal with the housing crisis is shocking. I heard Audrey Carville pin down the Minister to eventually putting a figure on the number of newly built local authority social housing in 2018 and he put it at 4,000. I advice him that the chances of that happening are less than zilch. I do not understand why those in government cannot tell the truth about what is happening. It is a bit like saying the US military can use Shannon Airport to bomb the living daylights out of wherever they like while we are still a neutral country.

The Land Development Agency is a joke. I do not know what the Minister knows about the industry but he is not showing a great knowledge of it at present. The Government talks about using the expertise of the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, in this regard. These are the NAMA boys who sold units in Cherrywood for €27,000, which are now being sold for €120,000. Also, NAMA allowed investors' directors with loans of €352 million to sell them for €26 million to a shell fund they had set up in Luxembourg and it gave them €25 million recently to build in Dublin. Give it to someone else. Those in government are unbelievable.

In 2015 I begged the then Fine Gael-Labour Party Government not to let NAMA sell Project Arrow to Cerberus; those were all residential properties in the Republic of Ireland and now the Government is buying back some of them. I am sure Cerberus will give them to the Government for the same price; it is a bloody joke.

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