For the more than 100,000 families and households rotting on housing lists for 15 years and longer and the thousands of families suffering the cruelty and hardship of homelessness, I regret to give my opinion that this document is an incredible disappointment. At best, it is yet another mirage and false dawn for those who desperately need solutions to the housing crisis. At worst, I believe it to be a cynical exercise in spoof and dishonesty in that it masks a move to retreat from the provision of local authority housing to the privatisation of housing provision under the guise of a promise of an increase in social housing provision.

If that contention is not true, the Taoiseach will be able to answer a simple question - an answer that is not contained in the report. How many local authority houses will be built between 2016 and 2020, the years of this plan? I am being very specific; my question is about local authority houses. I am not asking about the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, the housing assistance payment, HAP, leasing arrangements, public private partnerships or approved housing bodies. I am asking about council houses. How many will be built? It is not in the report, it was never in Deputy Alan Kelly's report and the Taoiseach never answers that question. I believe what is clearly spelt out in this document is that this is all about more incentives, grants and supports for private developers and vulture funds, in the hope of creating a mirage that the private, for profit sector will deliver the social housing we need when it will not. What we need are council houses.

If I am wrong, the Taoiseach should tell me. Will he give me the specific figures? How many council houses will be built next year and in subsequent years? I suspect the Taoiseach will not be able to give me the answer to the question. In any event, the figure will be well south of the headline figures being blasted all over the media at the moment. Let him prove me wrong and give hope to those who have been waiting for 15 years and longer on a housing list. Let him tell them there is light at the end of the tunnel. However, there is no such light in this document, which is a manifesto to privatise public housing.

I would have thought that out of all the discussions, consultations and detail in the report, the Deputy would have found something that might interest him. Obviously, he has a different view.

I cannot answer the Deputy's question-----

I know the Taoiseach cannot.

-----which is why he asked it.

It is pretty elementary.

Let me explain. The Deputy will not be able to answer my question either. Some 47,000 social housing units are to be delivered by 2021, supported by an investment of €5.35 billion. That is real money that is on the table. However, Deputy Boyd Barrett will not be able to answer the question as to the impact of a housing delivery unit being set up in the Department with responsibility for housing. This unit will work with every local authority to improve the opportunity to build council houses. There will be a provision of money for the building of bridges, roads or access points, as the case may be, to get access to sites that are currently inaccessible. Councils will have the opportunity to design their own houses. The planning process will be expedited so that these things can happen.

The overall objective is to deliver 47,000 houses by 2021. It is impossible for any chief executive to say today that X number of council houses will be built by year end. When we take into account these facilities, the housing delivery unit in the Department and the opportunity for local authorities throughout the country to avail of the incentives to open up sites they have not been able to open up before, to expedite planning and to design their own houses, the answer to this question will become clearer as we move along.

The overall objective is for 47,000 houses with €5.35 billion on the table to make it happen. Local authorities have been the subject of a lot of pressure and there was a question on this from Deputy Micheál Martin earlier. Some local authorities perform better than others but voids and the regeneration of neglected houses into liveable units are opportunities for social houses to be provided by local authorities.

It is not possible to answer the Deputy's question directly because the answer lies in the incentives and facilities being made available to local authorities and the chief executives of those local authorities to get on with it and prove they can measure up both to the numbers and the timetable that has been set out.

I did not know this was questions to People Before Profit. I thought it was questions to the Taoiseach. It could not be more telling that, in answer to the most basic and elementary question, the Taoiseach cannot tell the House how many council houses the Government intends to deliver. That confirms that we are just getting a rehashed, slightly upscaled version of the Kelly plan. There are big headline figures but when one scratches beneath the surface, it is all dependent on "incentives" to the private sector in the shape of infrastructural grants and the transfer of public land. Could we cosset them any more than we have already done? Was it not the cosseting and incentivising of these people that led to the last property crash while delivering no social housing? The Taoiseach pursues this mirage but this will be a disastrous failure.

If the Taoiseach cannot answer the question as to how many local authority houses are to be built, which is damning, why did he not accept the recommendations of the Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Homelessness? There is to be no moratorium on repossessions, no request to the EU to break the fiscal rules on investment in social housing and no rent controls. Could it be any more of a mirage than that? The Government did not even listen to its own all-party Oireachtas committee.

The Deputy is entirely wrong and I disagree with him. The figure of 47,000 is real; the figure of €5.35 billion is real. I did not hear the Deputy say how many council houses are going to be built in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown this year and, of course, he knows all these answers.

I will give the Taoiseach the answer. The number is 53 while 600 joined the housing list.

Does he know how many were built in the past ten years? I did not mention incentives for private operators but I did mention incentives for local authorities, such as a €200 million fund for access to sites that are currently off limits and the opportunity to design their own schemes and expedite planning permissions so that they can get on with building council houses for tenants all over the country.

The Taoiseach cannot give me the numbers.

Councils and local authorities are to be given the opportunity to improve and repair voided units and to take over houses that are not finished and finish them for their own social housing clients.

We need council houses.

Every chief executive of a local authority now has the opportunity to work towards the overall objective of 47,000 units by 2021.

There is a special response to the report of the Oireachtas committee, which was well chaired by Deputy John Curran, in an appendix to the report. Each and every proposal that was made has been responded to by the Minister.

Most of the recommendations were rejected.

Not all of the recommendations were accepted but the real intent of the Government is to provide, over the five pillars referred to, 47,000 social units by 2021 and an improvement in so far as we will be able to spend €5.35 billion in that period. That is the real challenge.