An initiative to speed up delivery of the 10,000 "affordable houses" promised under Sustaining Progress was announced yesterday by the Taoiseach.
Mr Ahern said the Government was prepared to swap State-owned lands for private sites on which housing developments had already been completed, to ensure houses became more quickly available.
He said a site adjacent to Harcourt Terrace Garda Station in Dublin had been selected as the first under the scheme to be provided to a private developer.
The provision of the 10,000 houses was a key social element of Sustaining Progress when the partnership deal was negotiated two years ago, but the Government has been criticised for the slow pace of delivery.
State lands in counties including Dublin, Galway, Meath and Kildare, to be used under the scheme, have been released over the past 18 months.
Mr Ahern told The Irish Times yesterday it was now "a question of getting [ those lands] turned into bricks and mortar".
"Naturally I wish you could just operate private sector norms and get on now and build, but that's not possible because of all the rules and regulations and procurement and cover-your-back that goes on in the system. But that's how it is. It is painfully slow," he said.
One thing the Government was examining was land swaps, "where the private sector have built houses and where they are prepared to give their finished houses for land that the State has".
This would be done on the Harcourt Terrace site very shortly, he said. "It will be innovative. I hope it doesn't create any difficulty, that people won't say 'you're doing some kind of a deal with developers'. It is the only way of doing this quickly and the construction industry are happy to do this."
A Government spokesman said two parcels of land were involved, totalling 0.4 of an acre. The matter was at the procurement stage and expressions of interest had been sought from developers.
He said 500 housing units had been constructed under the Sustaining Progress scheme in 2004 and a further 1,300 were due to be completed by the end of this year. The scheme is aimed at people who, until the housing boom, could have afforded to take out mortgages but are now excluded from the market.
Mr Ahern was speaking after he addressed a conference in Dublin marking the 25th anniversary of Industrial Relations News.
