John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would like to talk briefly about voids in the Louth County Council area. Some 97 voids have been brought back into stock in the last year and families are now living in them. Louth County Council has been one of the most ambitious local authorities in terms of taking voids back into use since 2016, when we were using compulsory purchase orders to take vacant houses. It is not all doom and gloom with other local authorities. In places like Donegal, as Senator Blaney said, and in my county of Louth, our local authorities and our directors of services are absolutely flying. In my last minute, I would like to pay tribute to the housing staff in Louth County Council. They have done tremendous work throughout Covid, whether it is people processing HAP over the phone, or maintenance guys like Gerard Savage going into homes to fix serious issues.

I want to raise one concern about maintenance. There is a serious issue with funding for housing maintenance in Louth County Council where, on average, it is costing about €350 per unit. It is much more expensive because there is more funding in other local authorities per unit. The problem with that is that the engineers end up looking at their budgets every week, and end up doing more on managing budgets, rather than getting the work done in the first instance. That leads to my final point. It will be brilliant once the national retrofitting scheme comes into play, because it will fix many of the issues in the first place. Local authorities will not have to spend money on fixing houses and doors, etc. I ask the Minister to provide an indication of when that scheme is due to be implemented.