Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

No, as nothing wrong ever happens in County Westmeath, but it happens in the rest of the country. The issue must be dealt with. There is no point in having local authority houses empty and the State paying on the double. We must tackle the problem.

The payment of rent supplement interferes with people's ability to take up jobs because of the way the scheme is structured. It should only be a temporary measure. I favour the social integration for which rent supplement sometimes provides, rather than having everybody segregated in housing estates. We have seen the problems which have been caused as a result in certain cities. Rent supplement facilitates social integration, which is one of the good points of the rental accommodation scheme. We are not putting less well-off persons in a single place which has created problems in the past.

There is a peculiar arrangement in place with regard to the Private Residential Tenancies Board which the Minister of State, Deputy Finneran, and I want to address. Currently, a tenancy begins before the Department informs the PRTB with which the landlord is then obliged to register. It is a little like getting guests to stay in a hotel before obliging it to register with Fáilte Ireland. It seems a very bad way to ensure the process is correct. Rather than registering the tenancy with the PRTB, the first obligation should be to register the property with the board which should, in turn, inform the local authority which should then inspect the property to ensure compliance with standards, including the building energy rating standards. Despite popular myth, the level of fuel poverty is higher in rented accommodation than one-off housing.