Housing Schemes
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-05
============================================================

Eoin Ó Broin (SF), Dublin Mid-West

Earlier this week the Minister visited Oscar Traynor Road, where there are two- and three- bedroom cost-rental units. The two-bedroom units cost almost €1,600 per month and the three-bedroom units cost almost €1,800 per month. That means people need a net income of €54,000 to be able to access the two-bedroom units and €64,000 for the three-bedroom units. This tells us that a huge group of people who are not eligible for social housing, but whose incomes are below those levels, are locked out.
Approximately 26% of applicants to the LDA's cost-rental stock are excluded on affordability grounds. For three-bedroom schemes run by local authorities and AHBs, it can be as high as 50%. The Minister has not even acknowledged there is a problem. We are all strong supporters of cost rental. If the Government had listened to us or to such organisations as NESC and the ESRI in the past, we would have been doing this a decade or more ago. However, right now, there are thousands upon thousands of working people who cannot access social housing, do not earn enough for cost rental and have no housing options. Does the Minister accept there is a problem? What will he do to address it?

---

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/2026-03-05/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:44+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-05