Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)

Can I give the Minister of State a bit of advice and provide him with a solution? I sincerely want the Government to take this on board. He has just said the voids programme will be open in the new year. Why is it not open today? Why is the voids programme not open 365 days a year so that when a house comes back, the local authority can fix it up and allocate it out? Opening it just once or twice a year does not make sense. I am trying to be constructive but the Government always criticises us and says there is nothing coming from the Opposition. This is a simple fix here: keep the void programme open for 365 days a year so that houses are not left to rot.

Can I give the Minister of State one statistic? Data I received earlier this year from local authorities showed that one in four vacant houses is idle longer than 12 months. If we open the voids programme all year long, that will stop. We could get a fix here today. We could agree on this. We are trying to be cross-party constructive and that is something we could do together that would make a real difference to social housing and people on the housing list.

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