Building 50,000 homes ‘not the answer’

The Government has the capacity to build 50,000 social houses in the next two years but this would not be the solution to the homeless crisis, the housing minister claims.

Eoghan Murphy said money “isn’t a problem” when it comes to solving the housing and homeless crisis but has defended the rate of building by local authorities, saying: “If we wanted to go out and build 50,000 houses tomorrow, or over the course of let’s say two years, potentially we could do that, but we would be building them in the wrong places.

“We would be building them in large greenfield sites; we would be building large three-bedroom homes which is not the kind of stock we need when we look at the housing lists. When we look at the housing formation in this country, what we need to do is build thousands of new apartments, we have to build in the right places and we have to build communities.”