Dublin City Council insists it has a “very strong pipeline” of housing coming on-stream in the coming years.

It comes after former Tánaiste Michael McDowell criticised local authorities for not using their “huge budgets” to deliver more housing.

Noting that Dublin City Council has a budget of roughly €1bn, Senator McDowell said the authority was not building any homes and failing to bring vacant properties back to market.

He was speaking to Newstalk after the President Michael D Higgins labelled housing policy in Ireland a “great, great failure”.

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, DCC Assistant Chief Executive with responsibility for housing Coilin O’Reilly insisted the local authority had a “very strong pipeline” of housing coming on-stream.

He said there are currently 1,214 unit under construction that are due to be completed this year and early next year.

Meanwhile, there are 642 at tender stage and 4,000 at planning and design stage.

“We do have a very strong pipeline of delivery under Housing for All,” he said. “We are confident we can deliver the required number of units under the programme.”

He said many people have a “simplistic view” of vacant and derelict sites – insisting that it often does not make economic sense to refurbish them.

“The reality is that a lot of these are in private ownership and if it was economically viable to do them up, the owner would do that themselves,” he said.

“You have to ask yourself, why isn’t that happening?

“A lot of the time it is to do with the existing condition. Then you have to get into the need to get planning permission for it, fire regulations, building regulations, how you get access to it ... so these things are much more complex than people often assume.”

He said DCC has identified 721 potential vacant buildings it can acquire and renew over the next five years.

He said acquiring derelict buildings through Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO) is also more difficult than many people think – noting that DCC has attempted to CPO somewhere between 20 and 30 properties in the past year.

“The definition of dereliction yet again … it is not as simple as driving by a house that nobody is living in and calling it derelict,” he said.

“For a derelict site to be up for CPO by local authorities, the roof has to be gone, it has to have no windows, or you know, the walls have to be collapsing – so it is complex.”

President Higgins speech has put the housing crisis back at the centre of the news agenda over the past week.

On The Pat Kenny Show last week, the Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said he agreed with a lot of what the president had to say.

On The Hard Shoulder meanwhile, the Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien said the crisis was not a “disaster” but admitted it is “very difficult for people”.

You can listen back to Mr O’Reilly here: