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

In terms of the Deputy's question about whether there is a disconnect with local authorities, I just said in my reply that the Minister has provided an additional 200 staff to local authorities. He recognised that, and we have been, since we came into office, very serious about social housing. There have been a number of years where it has taken a while to catch up. We want to do 9,500 this year in terms of direct builds. The approved social housing bodies have taken up a lot of the slack in providing housing. Those bodies have done good work and we have great trust in them in terms of Housing First and the homelessness strategy. The local authorities are being resourced now to ramp up their housing programmes and get projects under way. Some local authorities are doing very well, others not so well. Some local authorities quite simply had lost the human resources capacity to deliver meaningful social housing programmes. That has been rectified by the Minister and I think we will see, in respect of social housing, stronger and higher outputs from local authorities to balance the output from the approved social housing bodies. It is preferable that we would build more social houses as opposed to relying unduly on the housing assistance payment, HAP, system. The HAP system has been in place for almost ten years now.

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