Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have this opportunity to say just a few words on this issue, which is very important for everybody.

It goes without saying that the announcements made by Government in the past 24 hours or so are helpful. There is no doubt about that. They are a start. They are not, could not and were not intended to be the total solution but they are a start and will make it possible for families to look again at the possibility of providing themselves with a home by one means or another.

It is important to ensure that the public knows fully how the schemes work and how operable they are. Excellent schemes were available in the past but when you inquired about whether you qualified for them on income or age grounds, they did not cut the mustard. The more schemes we have to deal with and the more information is available to possible applicants about housing and the initial stages, the quicker we can try to resolve the housing problem.

A number of schemes should still be considered. The subsidised private sites scheme was very influential all over the country in the past. Under this scheme, serviced sites were made available. Incidentally, they are still being made available through the approved housing bodies, AHBs, but in the scheme with which I dealt, we had to buy the sites at commercial value, which was a fair difference compared to what was available through the AHBs.

I saw situations where land was free in a particular development but it did not make any difference to the price of houses. The land came free because it was zoned by way of agreement. In recent times, the Taoiseach has said about 250,000 houses are needed and I agree with that. Whether we can do that is up to us but it will require about 60,000 finished houses per annum, with that figure descending as the need is reduced because otherwise we would have a flop in prices. I ask that consideration be given to that and also to log cabins and modular houses. I noticed that the modular homes proposal disappeared for a while. I cannot understand why that happened. We need a great deal of urgency to be applied in the shortest possible time. There is still scope to do it. We can still make a difference and we can still address the concerns of the people who worry about their housing needs and how they are going to meet them themselves.

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