Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Naturally, we would rather invest all taxpayers' money into capital projects but we need housing today. The numbers availing of HAP housing in the last three years is around 48,000 families. These could not have been built any quicker in a capital programme. Over time, we are committed to replenishing the social housing stock and bringing it to a level similar to other European countries. We are committed to a level of social housing stock. Other parties are not going there. They talk about numbers but no one reaches our ambition. We have set aside money to put behind that and the pipeline projects, and the new processes to deliver on that because we do believe in building social houses that the State owns. While we are building them, however, we must find people homes for today and the months ahead and for next year. That means we must work with the private sector to subsidise that and support that. We would much rather that money went into social housing, however other Governments did not continue to build social housing. Previous Governments ceased building social housing but we restarted that over the last two and a half or three years. We are making good progress, on which we will continue to build.

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