Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Allow me to make the point, please. We want those 2,400 families housed. Local authorities in some instances need to develop capacity and land to get into direct building. The leasing we are talking about here is not the dominant form or model for the provision of social housing at all. That gets lost in the debate because one would imagine that every social house is going to be leased and that is not the case. Up to 80% of such houses right now will be delivered either through approved social housing bodies or local authorities.

That needs to increase. We need to go back to the days when local authorities built houses, including social houses. That is what we want. That will require capacity build-up in some of the local authorities, which the Deputies themselves acknowledged, to be fair, in their presentations. Some of the local authorities need to get back to that and need to get it into their heads that that is where social housing is going. The State is saying we have to get involved, through the Land Development Agency and through local authorities, to provide affordable housing also and to provide opportunities. At the moment we are at about 19,000 to 20,000 homes for 2021. The figure was 20,000 last year. That just is not enough.

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