Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The facts are simple. When the Tánaiste met the developers about the strategic housing development, did they tell him that they had hundreds of extant planning permissions and that they just were not building because they were hoarding the land in order to flip it and make the best conceivable profit? Is that not the reality? It used to take eight weeks for a local authority to make a decision and then four weeks for An Bord Pleanála. The system used to work. We built 400,000 houses. Previously, we built more houses than the UK built and that could be done again, but the Government is not doing it. Unfortunately, that is the reality. Fine Gael has shown that it cannot be trusted with housing. Gene Kerrigan has stated that we should not leave housing to developers. The time has finally come to get the Land Development Agency or a new national housing executive into action with local authorities and to start building houses with the aim of having 35,000 to 40,000 homes being produced year in and year out. That is the kind of production that we need. I asked the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government when we would have equilibrium in the housing market. He could not tell me whether it would be 2030 or 2040. That will be the case if Fine Gael stays in power.

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