Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North-Central, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Minister of State. I might pick up on the last point. It is interesting to hear that only 20% of the fund has been drawn down. I know that in the case of both Cork City Council and Cork County Council they have drawn down the full allocation for 2025, or committed to it. If only 20% of the funding has been drawn down, could the reallocation of the funding from other local authorities not be considered if they have not drawn it down? Does the Minister of State have figures for 2024 which show whether the full allocation was drawn down? I am interested in hearing about that.

The Minister of State referred to the merits of the scheme. I do not need to be convinced of how good the scheme is; we all know the scheme works. As he outlined, it has delivered 3,300 second-hand acquisitions. It is a great scheme. I just do not understand why we are barring people from availing of it, which is effectively what we are doing. Whether we like to admit it here or not, we are doing that because a commitment was given to local authorities to go beyond the 2024 allocation and proactive local authorities such as Cork City Council and Cork County Council did exactly that. They used the scheme to its fullest extent and then they went beyond it, as per the circular, and exceeded their targets by 50%. They were permitted to do that. At that time, nobody flagged with either local authority in Cork or elsewhere that the money would affect their budget in 2025, which is what has happened. The logical step is to increase the budget for 2025 to allow people to engage with the scheme and to allow local authorities to start acquiring more properties. To be fair to her, the director of services in Cork City Council very rarely makes a public comment about Government decisions like this, but she said this would have a significant effect on the prevention of homelessness in Cork. That is the reality of what we are doing.

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