First-time buyers are facing less and less choice as the State is buying one in four new houses, according to a senior lecturer in housing.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Dr Lorcan Sirr said the State's role in the housing market has gone from about 11% five years ago to nearly 25% now.
"So the State is buying one in four of all brand new houses. At the same time we see the amount of houses being bought by first-time buyers is going down and we see the number of housing coming for sale on the market has reduced considerably."
He said more control should be given back to local authorities to ensure more social housing is built and one way to achieve this would be to "get rid" of the lengthy four stage process, which he believes is hindering the delivery of social housing.
Dr Sirr said data from the Department of Housing reveals that two local authorities, including Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien's own Fingal County Council and Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s Cork City Council, did not build any social housing last year, or buy any.
He said South Dublin County Council, "which has 5,000 households on the housing waiting list", built just two and bought none.
Dr Sirr said Approved Housing Bodies are active in local areas and are increasingly taking on "the burden" and purchasing and building housing.
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"The question is why is the heavy lifting all being done by the approved housing bodies and what has happened to local authorities in that the number the houses that they build is falling off a cliff?"
Dr Sirr also said a lot of local authorities will say they have no land and therefore they have to go down the route of buying houses or getting others to build.
However, Dublin City Council has "somewhere in the region of 85 hectares," he said, which he estimated would allow for up to 18,000 houses to be built.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin TD for Fingal, Louise O'Reilly, has said that the failure of Fingal County Council to directly build any social homes in 2021 was "shocking", and Minister O’Brien, has serious questions to answer.
Ms O'Reilly said: "Anyone who lives in Fingal knows the length of social housing waiting lists in the area which are on average over eight years, and the desperate need that exists for people to be housed.
"This is a shocking state of affairs as not only does Fingal have some of the longest housing waiting lists in the State, but it also has the fastest growing population," she added.
