O’Brien ‘not running scared’
PLANS to publish revised housing targets to reflect the growing population have been delayed, but Minister Darragh O’Brien insists he’s not ‘running scared’ of revealing them.
Current targets of 33,000 units a year are based on 2016 census data, but by the following census in 2022 the population had soared by 387,274. Revised targets to reflect the population growth, expected to be 50,000 units a year, were promised in the first quarter of this year, but have now been delayed until June.
In June last year, the Department of Housing told this newspaper it expected the revised targets, based on research by the Economic Social and Research Institute (ESRI), to be finalised in the first three months of 2024.
However, earlier this week, the Housing Minister told Virgin Media News they would now not be ready until the end of June.
When pressed on the delay yesterday, Mr O’Brien told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘I’m not running scared from anything.’ He insisted the targets in the Government’s Housing for All plan ‘aren’t ceilings, they’ve been the floor’.
He went on: ‘We’re waiting for data back from the ESRI. I think when we set targets going forward on the basis of population growth, that’s the right thing to do. And we’ll assess that data when it comes back in.’
The Government yesterday provided a quarterly update for its Housing for All programme, which is the Coalition’s blueprint for solving the crisis in this area.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar admitted the housing deficit ‘remains very big’, but insisted great progress is being made.