Let’s have a dedicated housing department

I BELIEVE it’s time our housing needs were looked after by a special department of state?

There are thousands of houses lying empty while 70,000 people nationwide are on waiting lists.

With a bit of constructive thinking, people could have secure housing much sooner.

Millions of euro are given out every year on rent allowance, rental accommodation schemes or family income supplements.

This is a short-term answer to a long-term problem.

The overlapping of services between so many government departments must cost a fortune — this produces no real results for those who want a home but cannot afford it.

It is embarrassing to see homeless people being accommodated in B&Bs in Dublin. This does not make economic sense.

The rental accommodation scheme makes even less sense. Why give €700 a month to a landlord when we could have social housing or support people with affordable housing with this kind of money?

The national development plan launched last year promised €21bn for social and affordable housing over the following seven years.

This was to provide 60,000 new local authority houses over the period of the plan, as well as another 17,000 affordable homes.

The plan claimed it would benefit 140,000 households over the seven-year period.

So where has all this money gone? Is it swallowed up in civil service bureaucracy with housing needs being dealt with by so many departments and agencies?

If the HSE were to deal only with health services (at present you have to go through social services to get a rent allowance), and let a housing department deal with housing needs, we might get some way towards sorting out the mess of the ever-lengthening waiting lists.

Nuala Nolan

Bowling Green

Galway