The Housing Minister is being urged to ensure that the new affordable housing scheme is "adequately funded".

Minister Eoghan Murphy is due to launch the final details of the scheme in the coming weeks.

Sinn Féin Housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, said the principles of the scheme are good.

He said: "Households on incomes below €75,000 can buy good quality homes for between €170,000 and €225,000.

"While the building and mortgage finance comes from private banks, the state services the land and sells the sites to the Housing Association at below market costs.

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"There is no reason why Local Authorities themselves could not deliver such affordable housing. They could also use the same scheme to provide affordable long term rental for working people.

"Unfortunately the Minister announced just €25m for this scheme over two years. Given that the outlay per unit will be between €20,000 and €40,000 this means that somewhere between 625 and 1250 units could be delivered.

"Given the level of affordable housing need this is nowhere near enough.

"The government will claim it has other initiatives underway to deal with the issue of affordability, such as the Help to Buy, the Local Infrastructure Fund and the Home Building Finance Ireland.

"Combined these schemes will see €1.1bn in loans, tax breaks and subsidies to private developers with no guarantee of genuine affordability.

"In our alternative budget for 2018 we prioritised investment in affordable housing. We proposed an investment of €428m to deliver 2,000 affordable rental and 2,500 affordable purchase homes in a single year."

(CD/LM)