Residents cannot be allowed to veto social housing, says Coveney

Tens of thousands of new units of social housing planned for the coming years must be integrated with private housing to establish a mix of housing types in towns and cities, Minister for Housing Simon Coveney has said.

The Government is preparing to accelerate a huge programme of social housing but was determined to avoid the "mistakes of decades ago" that saw "huge swathes of urban areas" given over to purely social housing, Mr Coveney told the Dáil Housing and Homelessness Committee.

Instead, he said, the Government would enforce a mixture of public and private housing.

He acknowledged this would be “not popular in some areas” but said it was the right thing to do.

“We cannot have a situation where some communities block social housing in their area because they don’t want it.”

Mr Coveney was speaking to the Dail Housing and Homelessness Committee, which has been meeting intensively in recent weeks.

The committee will produce a report on the housing crisis and proposed solutions in the coming weeks, which will inform the housing strategy that Mr Coveney has said he will complete over the summer.

It is likely to be published at the end of August, and will serve as the Government’s action plan for addressing the housing shortage.

Mr Coveney said that while the deadline for the housing action plan was in mid-August, it was likely to be delayed until the end of August due to summer holidays.

In his preliminary remarks to the committee this morning, Mr Coveney said that without decision quickly, “it could take another 10 years for the market to right itself and for supply to meet our needs.”

“I am firmly of the view that the position can only be described as an emergency situation in our key urban centres particularly in Dublin and Cork,” he said.

However, the Fianna Fail TD Barry Cowen said that the situation was every bit as serious "in the towns and villages that I represent" as it was in Dublin.

Mr Cowen was also critical of the EU’s fiscal rules, which he said “prevent the Government from spending the extraordinary amount of money that is needed.”