Housing Minister On Homelessness, Housing Targets & Short-Term Lets

You're very welcome back.

I'm joined now in studio by the Ireland and Britain editor of the Irish Times, Mark Hennessy, by journalist Sarah McGuinness and by Euronews' Europe correspondent, Shona Murray.

Thank you all very much for coming in.

I will come to yourself, Sarah, actually, as someone who is only fleetingly in Ireland because people might recognise you from The Tonight Show and our name and previous contributions.

You've been living elsewhere and you're about to move elsewhere.

Funnily enough, you're moving to London, which is...

Good spot to be a journalist in, I imagine.

Could he not have held off for two

weeks? I'm missing all the excitement.

Listen,

there'll be plenty of content when you get there in a fortnight.

But as someone who is not currently long-term resident here, but is very familiar with the acute shortage of housing and all the rental issues, were you filled with any confidence by what you heard from James Brown in the first part of the programme?

Oh, no, no offence to James Brown, but absolutely not.

Like, it just seems to be this never ending state of paralysis, doesn't it? Whereby, like, the government doesn't want to piss off developers.

It doesn't want to piss off the likes of Airbnb and it doesn't want to piss off its own constituents.

So where does that leave you? Not setting targets for anything, because if you don't do that, you can't miss them.

And therefore...

You're in the clear, clearly.

Because I have some sympathy for the idea that it isn't necessarily about the targets, but about the process that produces the homes.

I kind of understand that, but also just as a numbers man, but also as a journalist trying to objectively assess how a government is doing, it's kind of infuriating that there isn't really a metric by which you can now measure them and say they're doing well or not.

I think you could just, you could try, you know, you could try.

And, you know, when they had targets, they weren't realistic, they were too low.

So then when they readjusted the targets, some people might remember in 2023, so that they were actually looking at, oh God, maybe we don't need 32,000 homes, which we've already delivered.

Maybe we actually need 60,000 homes out of 2030. you know, like you could at least try to meet them for more than a year.

I also think, I was actually at the press conference where this whole idea of we're not setting targets anymore happened.