Ukraine War
Dail Éireann — 2022-05-05
============================================================

Richard Bruton (FG), Dublin Bay North

I thank the Minister of State for the reply.
I will ask the Minister of State a number of specific questions. There are 62,000 holiday homes and there is a window of opportunity to potentially bring them into use. It probably would need some level of payment though, to attract some of those 62,000 into use. They would be really valuable.
I welcome the fact that the Minister of State has an emergency vacant housing delivery unit, he has the Office of Public Works, OPW, looking at modular building and he has a clearing house in his own Department but it seems a quite complex structure. Should we not be going for a more focused singularly responsible leader for all of this response, whether it be modular, activating vacant property or removing infrastructural blockages and giving that body the authority to modify schemes, such as the lease scheme, in order that one could have a more speedy response without bureaucracy?

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-05-05/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:50:24+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-05-05