Fianna Fáil rowed back on comments from Housing Minister James Browne that Nama boss Brendan McDonagh is his “preferred candidate”, with party figures insisting no decision had been made on the appointment.
The Government’s Cabinet sub-committee on housing will this afternoon discuss the role. It was previously expected Mr McDonagh’s name will be formally put forward by Mr Browne. It is unclear whether this is still the case.
The appointment of the new office will then be formally rubber-stamped at a full cabinet meeting.
“No decision has been made in terms of the person who’s going to head [the Housing Activation Office],” Taoiseach Micheál Martin told the Dáil.
On Mr McDonagh, he said: “No decision has been made in terms of that individual, and the Government will decide in the time ahead.”
Most people who job-share take home half a wage
The opposition again heavily criticised the proposed appointment.
“That level – almost half a million euro to take up the responsibilities of the Housing Minister – is cracked,” Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said in the Dáil.
“To tell you the God’s honest truth, most people who job-share take home half a wage. You want this individual to take home almost half a million.
Ms McDonald called on Mr Martin to justify the salary to people who were struggling, asking whether he had “come to your senses, having had the night to sleep on it”.
Mr McDonagh will be taken on a secondment from the National Treasury Management Agency. He is currently on a secondment from the agency to Nama, the State’s bad bank, which is due to wind up at the end of the year.
Fine Gael ministers were left fuming and questioning transparency around the appointment.
They pushed back against the plan, saying €430,000 is too high a salary and also privately raised questions about the transparency surrounding the appointment.
Ministers also had questions over the “huge amount of political capital” the role costs, even though it “won’t change anything” in helping to solve the housing crisis.
Tánaiste Simon Harris is understood to not have been aware of who would be appointed to the role before Mr McDonagh’s name emerged in media reports last week.
“The Tánaiste’s view is that appointments of this scale, given the importance of this office which has been agreed by [the] Cabinet today to establish, that they should be discussed by the leaders in advance of any name being made public,” a spokesperson for Mr Harris said yesterday.
Mr McDonagh had been expected to become head of the new Housing Activation Office, which aims to speed up the building of new homes.
Mr Browne said the office would be tasked with coming up with “rapid responses from all angles and unblocking delivery via a targeted team of experts”.
The unit will work with city and county councils to identify sites where housing could be built and work to solve blockages that stand in the way of homes being delivered.
Initially, the office has been established for three years and will be made up of around eight to 11 people.
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