The housing and homelessness committee has split over its final report.

The Committee issued it today, making 70 recommendations including telling the Government to build 50,000 social homes in the next five years.

But Anti Austerity Alliance TD Ruth Coppinger didn’t attend the launch and issued her own minority report.

The Dublin West deputy says the committee wasn’t ambitious enough: “We put more than any other party into the report in the sense of research and work and questioning.

“What I suppose sealed it for me was the social housing targets, they are still far too low given the scale of the emergency that we have.

“It would actually take 15 years to clear the existing list, to take no account of new families that are nearly going on it and those who are struggling to pay their rents in private rented accommodation who aren’t on it.”

Earlier

There has been a broad welcome for the recommendations of the Housing Committee, which include delivering 10,000 social houses for the next five years.

The cross-party committee also wants to see rent certainty for tenants, as well as higher rent supplements, to prevent more families from becoming homeless.

The group is also recommending that banks are stopped from evicting homeowners until laws around arrears are changed.

Mike Allen from Focus Ireland is happy their suggestions were taken on board: “There are very positive things about rent certainty, increasing rent supplement to real levels so that the market demands and most importantly delivering a much higher level of social housing to local authorities.

“So really the next question is how much of this gets into Simon Coveney’s action plan and then very quickly move onto the actual action.”