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

I thank the Deputy for her question. Every delivery mechanism that increases the stock of social housing is important. That is why we have a number of such mechanisms. In the event that a particular mechanism is not successful in a given period or year, we can then make up the shortfall using other delivery streams. It is important to have that kind of redundancy in place. If there are shocks that we have not anticipated, that might potentially take one stream of delivery away but we have others on which we can rely. As a result, we will never be in a situation where there is nothing happening in the context of the delivery of social housing.

What I expect to see with, for example, voids - we discussed this matter at a meeting of the relevant joint committee in December - is that we will exceed our target. However, we will still only count the number we identified in the context initially. This means that even though we will complete work on more voids than originally envisaged, we will not count above the ceiling we have in respect of our target. I also indicated to the joint committee that we will probably exceed our target for acquisitions. I know that we will do so because I had to allocate extra funding towards the end of the year when I received additional supplementary funding approved by Cabinet in respect of further acquisitions. Part of the reason for this was that leasing was not happening in some areas in the way we hoped.

When the numbers have been finalised - this will certainly happen prior to the housing summit, which is scheduled for the end of the month - I will provide the Deputy with a breakdown of the targets per local authority in order that she can see which local authorities exceeded their targets and which did not. We can then have a conversation on the reason this might have happened.

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