Martin Brady (Fianna Fail)

I thank and welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Finneran. He has done very good work in various areas as the Minister with responsibility for housing but I will not go into that. This is a very useful exercise and these figures give some idea of the problems that exist. According to the report, in the area covered by Dublin City Council more than 6,000 houses are unoccupied. We received word from the city council recently that there are 4,600 applicants waiting on the housing list in the same area. In Fingal approximately the same number are waiting. Overall in Dublin, more than 8,000 people are waiting. At the same time we are giving several of these people rental subsidies from the HSE. This is ridiculous and people are beginning to question why we are doing this when there are so many empty houses. We can all go back over history and discuss how this came about and so on and I will refer to that but I do not believe it will achieve anything. Senator Doherty referred to this matter in what was probably his pre-election speech. However, it does not achieve anything to knock something that happened in the past because there is nothing we can do about it now. We must take now as a starting point and move on. Many mistakes have been made, there is no doubt about that.