Looks like a concerted effort by Minister of State Michael Finneran to deal with the surplus of houses held by developers. His department has tried three initiatives to help these unfortunate developers. The first was a kind of sub-prime mortgage scheme run and financed by his department, and I heard him being interviewed on this one a few weeks back. He was defending the cost of four staff involved in the scheme, a scheme that had sold only four mortgages in the six months or so up to the date of the interview.
The second bite at the cherry was the lease scheme whereby local authorities have been provided with 20 million of finance to lease properties for 5 to 10 years from developers, the houses to be provided to council tenants. This scheme is up and running, with adverts by local authorities placed in papers a few weeks back.
His most recent bailout was his targeting of emergency housing funding to again lease houses from developers with unsold stock.
The beauty of all these schemes is that they all help out developers, which seems to have done no harm at all to the junior minister -- he retained his job in the recent cuts, so he must be doing something right. The two leasing schemes in particular allow developers to batten down the hatches and hold their stock until things improve, with the taxpayer picking up the bill. Good old FF, they never lost it!
Won't be too popular with people in nice estates with a shed-load of negative equity!