A new agency set up to accelerate delivery of the 10,000 affordable homes promised under Sustaining Progress is to begin work immediately, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said yesterday.
Mr Ahern announced the establishment of the The Affordable Homes Partnership, to be headed by former Siptu leader Des Geraghty, when he addressed the biennial conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) in Belfast.
The agency will have the managers of the four Dublin local authorities on its board and will initially concentrate on the provision of affordable housing in the greater Dublin area.
Among its first tasks will be to oversee a new scheme under which developers will be given State-owned land in exchange for completed houses or zoned lands for housing.
Mr Ahern announced plans for this scheme in an interview with The Irish Times in February.
He confirmed yesterday that the first such land swap had been completed, with a "premium site" at Harcourt Terrace in Dublin being given to a developer in return for 200 housing units at various locations in greater Dublin. The developer concerned is Durkan Homes.
The 200 houses are to be made available on a phased basis over the next nine months, beginning this month, Mr Ahern said.
Six further sites had been selected as candidates for the land swap option and were being brought to the market "as a matter of urgency", he told the conference.
These were two sites at Backweston and sites at Model Farm Road, McGee Barracks, Gormanston and the former Garda station at Harcourt Terrace. This is a separate site from that acquired by Durkan Homes.
It was the second time Mr Ahern used his keynote address to an Ictu conference to announce an initiative under the affordable housing project. Two years in Tralee he revealed plans to release State and local authority lands, and since then some 70 sites have been assigned to the project.
The promise of 10,000 affordable houses, aimed at those whose incomes exclude them from local authority schemes but who cannot afford market prices for property, was a key provision of Sustaining Progress and helped secure unions' support for the deal.
Since then there has been criticism of the perceived slow pace of delivery. In a report presented to the conference, however, Mr Geraghty said "very significant progress" had been made, with "visible evidence of delivery throughout 2005".
The former Siptu president, who has been overseeing implementation of the project since early last year, said it was on track to deliver 3,300 affordable housing units in 2005 and 2006. A total of 1,350 units had already been completed while construction of a further 2,200 was under way, his report said.
Mr Geraghty said the Sustaining Progress scheme was just one of a number aimed at affordable housing applicants. When all such schemes were taken into account, it was projected that 7,300 new units would be built in the 2005-2006 period.
Yesterday's announcement was welcomed by Hubert Fitzpatrick, of the Irish Home Builders' Association, who said the new agency would be effective if in delivering more houses it addressed current bottlenecks in the system.
