A Government initiative to provide cheaper housing in new private estates resulted in just 163 "social and affordable" houses being built last year, despite a record overall output of 69,000 houses and apartments, writes Carl O'Brien.
Internal projections compiled by the Department of Environment estimate that around 500 social and affordable houses will be built in 2004, 1,000 in 2005 and 2,000 in 2006.
The figures come almost two years after the Government watered down a provision that up to 20 per cent of all private developments contain social and affordable housing.
Under pressure from the building industry, the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, said builders could provide financial compensation, or swap land, instead of the 20 per cent clause.
Initial indications are that developers and local authorities are choosing to opt for alternatives, such as financial sums, instead of providing social and affordable houses.
The Minister of State with responsibility for Housing, Mr Noel Ahern, defended Government efforts to increase the provision of social and affordable housing and said supply would increase substantially over time.
He also said it appeared builders were using "stockpiles" of planning permissions granted for land purchased prior to the introduction of the 20 per cent clause in August 1999.
"These things will always have a lead-in time of several years. It is not operating as fast as we would like, but these things take time to fully develop," Mr Ahern said.
He also said the figures did not include a substantial number of social and affordable houses, dating from a 1999 initiative, which were now coming onto the market.
Mr Matt Gallagher, chairman of the national committee of the Irish Home Builders' Association, accepted that numbers provided under the social integration initiative were low, but laid the blame with the Government.
He said developers were also choosing to take the option of financial compensation rather than hand over a proportion of their development for social and affordable housing.
"Given an option, a builder will probably go for cash. It's simple, less administrative hassle. Local authorities want us to build houses for them, and have dumped the social integration initiative on the builders ... the jury is still out on whether this initiative will work," he said.
A construction industry source said another factor was that private home-buyers simply did not want to live in a development with a social or affordable component.
"People are very fussy over who they live next door to. Ninety per cent of punters don't want to be near social housing, and builders are faced with that problem. Everyone's putting their heads in the sand on this issue," the source said.
Threshold, the national housing organisation, criticised the Government's handing of the social and affordable housing initiative and called for the 20 per cent clause to be fully implemented in all areas.
The group's chairwoman, Ms Aideen Hayden, said: "They're not using this 20 per cent clause to the fullest extent. If they don't, we all pay the price and communities will continue to disintegrate."
The group has also called for the level of local authority social housing to be doubled to help deal with what it says is a housing crisis.
Out of the 69,000 housing units built last year, over 5,000 local authority units - or 8 per cent of overall housing output - were local authority houses. Meanwhile, there are in excess of 48,000 families on local authority waiting-lists.
Building has yet to begin, meanwhile, on the 10,000 affordable houses promised during the lifetime of the Sustaining Progress pay deal.