Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Some people will accuse me of making public land available for free to private developers. We are not doing this. We are setting up a partnership to deliver mixed tenure communities. It involves private sector input, as well as local authority or approved housing body input, in order that we can have private houses next to social houses, affordable houses, affordable rental accommodation, perhaps some student accommodation or accommodation specifically designed for the elderly or for people with a disability. It is about trying to achieve mixed tenure. We will have three flagship projects under way before the end of the year to show how it can be done. That is what I mean when I talk about the strategic use of public land. We can provide space on zoned land to put these new projects together. It is a different approach towards providing social housing.

Incidentally, I welcome what Councillor Daithí Doolan said at one of the stakeholder sessions we held, when he spoke about supporting this approach, whereby 40% or 50% of a housing development might be private sector housing, 20% or 30% might be affordable housing and 20% or 25% might be social housing. In that way we will create a mix with diverse communities. We can move early to show how it can be done better than we have in the past. The idea that every acre of publicly owned land must be filled with mono tenure social housing that is all the same in housing estate after housing estate has created problems for us which we must try to avoid in the future. The 47,000 new social housing units we will create in the next six years must be integrated, where possible. Obviously, there will be some social housing estates, but we must also have mixed, diverse communities growing up together and achieving better outcomes.

I hope that gives Senators a flavour of the plan. If they have other suggestions to make, they should send them to us and we will try to take them on board.