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

I thank the Deputy for his questions. One of the later questions deals with institutional investors. They are not hoovering up properties to the extent people think they are. We need to rebalance our housing sector away from over-reliance on individual landlords with one or two properties; we need to find a balance there.

On the serviced sites fund, the second call has gone out from my Department to 19 local authorities. In answer to how much a home will cost under that serviced sites fund, it is a maximum of 40% off the market price and that will vary across the country. Now that we have done the regulations it will be open to each local authority to open its scheme depending on when it sees the houses coming to market through its own local authority lands and what it has programmed.

In response to Deputy Burton, I did not say I do not have responsibility for individual people. I said that as Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, I have responsibility for ensuring that everyone in the country has housing security - that they have a home. We are working to do that through social housing, affordable housing or housing more generally in the economy. It is very important that we do that. If the Deputy had been here the earlier contribution on the Rebuilding Ireland home loan, she would have heard it is not closed; it is open. There is plenty of funding within it and drawdowns are happening. We are working with local authorities where they are finding difficulty in drawing down that funding. The objective is to help people get affordable homes, with more than 10,000 people on the help-to-buy scheme and about 750 people through the Rebuilding Ireland home loan.

We have put in place a number of different programmes to help members of the Defence Forces, teachers, members of the Garda and nurses to be able to afford to buy a home or to be able to rent a home at a rate below the market rate. That is now coming through the local authorities and the housing bodies. We are working with them in conjunction with the European Investment Bank to make that more of a reality for more people.

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