Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour)

It is very difficult to take seriously the Government's commitments on infrastructure or on housing delivery. On infrastructure, what is clear from the correspondence and the revelations about Uisce Éireann is that it simply has not been provided with the necessary additional resourcing to enable it to step up to provide the vital connections that are necessary to ensure building at scale. On the delivery of homes, there is that 40,000 figure we now know is 10,000 off and across the country we are seeing communities who are left bereft, awaiting housing developments that are long promised. In Poolbeg, at the Irish Glass Bottle site, we were promised thousands of new homes. I met last week with the local housing action group there, which is despairing of hearing a firm agreement on the numbers of social and affordable homes to be provided on that crucial site. We are simply not seeing the delivery of homes or infrastructure and we still have not heard from the Minister as to what exactly the housing activation office is going to bring that will be additional and that will provide for the necessary capacity to build at the scale that Herbert Simms built at all those decades ago.

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