Housing Schemes
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-30
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Emer Higgins (FG), Dublin Mid-West

I thank Deputy O'Reilly for raising her constituents' experience with us here today. It is really important that everybody remembers that behind the statistics we read out in here are families. They are families exactly like that. It is for this exact reason the Government is allocating funding. According to the Department of housing, last year the Department funded a total of 68 second-hand acquisitions for Fingal County Council. Of those, 61 were for tenancy sustainment, allowing for these private tenancies to continue in preventing homelessness, and others were tenant in situ acquisitions. So far this year Fingal County Council has only seven second-hand acquisitions in the pipeline. That is the information I have from the Department of housing. It has been given €30.7 million to fund acquisition of housing. This is a 54% increase on its allocation last year.
I will certainly bring the Deputy's feedback to the Minister for housing because, ultimately, what I am being told is that there is funding there and Fingal County Council has that funding, but only seven second-hand acquisitions are in its current pipeline. Perhaps that is because there was a pipeline from last year that it is still working its way through. I do not know the detail of that but the people who do are in the local authority, and they are who the Deputy needs to engage with on this. I know and respect that the Deputy has already done that but I think we need to do that further. There is funding there for this. With this funding we want to support families who are at risk of homelessness. The funding has been allocated to the council and the Deputy has given us an example today of the kind of family for whom we need to do that.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-30