Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This sounds like a technical amendment, which sounds boring, irrelevant and maybe unimportant, but it is critically important to the work the Minister and the Government are doing around changing housing policy. Affordable cost rental is a brand new model of housing in Ireland that will provide both affordability and security of tenure for renters. That is critically important and nowhere more so than here in Dublin where many people do not qualify for social housing because their income is just above the social housing income threshold but they cannot afford to live and to pay rent. The introduction for the first time in the State's history of affordable cost rental housing, not only in Dublin but nationally, is very welcome.

It is an issue I and my former colleagues on Dublin City Council championed two years ago. The Minister will be familiar with O'Devaney Gardens, which is in my local area and which has the capacity to deliver more than 1,000 homes. That is a site where we, as councillors tried to amend the proposal for the site to ensure there would be a minimum 80% social and affordable on the site, including 30% affordable cost rental. We were challenged by the Opposition. In fact, we were threatened by legal action by the Opposition. I very much appreciate that the Minister is taking the action to legislate for affordable cost rental. It has been spoken about for a very long time by many politicians but the Minister and this Government is implementing it and will make it available throughout the country. I accept others, such as sustainable or ethical investment funds, will be in a position to provide affordable cost rental. They are important but our local authorities are closest to our local communities. In undertaking their housing needs assessments, they will now be able to include affordable cost rental in those. I welcome this development.

I thank the Minister for all the work he and his officials have done. I urge him to use his position at Cabinet to influence the Ministers for Finance, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform and others to ensure the local authorities are funded because we need to scale this up greatly. As the Minister said, 25 affordable cost rental homes were made available last week and there were more than 500 applications. That validates the Minister's action to change the provision of housing in the country, but it also sends a strong message to all of us that we need to scale it up massively. I am sure that is what the Minister plans to do in Housing for All and I wish him well in his work.