Paschal Donohoe (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister to the House. I shall respond to the points made by previous speakers beginning with Senator O'Malley and her quotation of the book to which she referred. I am lucky in that I have had the opportunity to read it. What is striking not so much about the book but the commentary and reporting on it by many journalists and newspapers is that they criticise it for its excessively optimistic approach to many factors. What has been consistent on the commentary offered is how over-optimistic the writers of different chapters have been about the issues to which they refer.

For every point that somebody makes we could all produce a quote or a book to back it up. With regard to the book referred to, I could produce volumes if I had the time to do it, by organisations such as Threshold and the Simon Community. I could quote other publications of the Economic and Social Research Institute, which was involved in the production of the book, and publications from Focus Ireland that provide a completely different analysis of where we stand, an analysis that is more in keeping with the experiences my colleagues and I have in terms of representing our constituents who are involved in issues such as this.

The most formative experience I have as a member of a local authority is dealing with housing. Senator O'Malley referred to the fact that she is a former member of a local authority. In the contributions I have heard from the Government side, particularly from the Minister, what was striking was that the issue of social and affordable housing is mentioned only once. Nowhere in the entire debate has the issue of rental housing been mentioned. If I am wrong I stand corrected because we are here to debate these matters. We need to talk about the people who are struggling to buy their own home whether in Dublin or elsewhere and those who are at the fringes of the housing market and caught up in the rental sector.

I wish to make two points in regard to the rental sector, an area that I only heard mentioned by speakers from this side of the House. Too many of our citizens are being taken advantage of within the rental sector by a small number of unscrupulous and rogue landlords. Some figures, to which Senator Coffey referred, indicate that last year the local authorities carried out inspections of 9,800 private rental properties. Of those they found there were significant quality issues in 20% of them, which means one in five houses in the rental sector was not in keeping with the minimum standards for decent living accommodation. Out of those 1,900 cases that were inspected legal action was taken against only 36 landlords. I can name 36 properties in my own constituency that have such issues.

We need to ensure that standards in the private rental sector are up to date. I understand this aspect will be examined later in the year. The local authorities are incentivised by central Government to do their job better in ensuring those standards are regulated. The people in those properties need our support for a better standard of living.

For God's sake let us provide an affordable housing scheme that is genuinely affordable. Whole swathes of our population on low and middle incomes cannot afford to buy a house and do not qualify for the affordable housing scheme either. The Minister of State can be consistent when he has had the privilege of being in Government for ten years. We need to deliver on this area. We do not need to talk about housing output all the time. We need to ensure the houses being produced are affordable and that people can get into them. That is the role of central Government through the local authorities. I look forward to the response of the Minister of State on those issues.