A fourfold increase in social housing is needed in the next decade if the Republic's housing demand is to be met, according to a leading sociologist from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).

Mr Tony Fahey said 10,000 social housing units would be needed each year, compared with approximately 2,100 units built each year over the last decade. His views are contained in the latest edition of the Irish Banking Review.

He said local authority housing departments were "woefully lacking in the capacity to meet a challenge of this scale" at the present time.

"They have made a great deal of progress in developing an adequate management approach to their existing housing stock since the mid-1990s, but are quite unready to launch a major new housing drive," he stated.

He said local authorities in recent years had concentrated on "small, high-quality social housing schemes highly integrated into existing urban environments".

While this was laudable in other circumstances, "it is ill-fitted to cope with the demands of a mass housing drive". In the future "large new greenfield or brownfield developments will be hard to avoid", he added.

He said the large output of social housing did not necessarily have to be provided by local authorities.

"Some of it might be provided through an increase in shared ownership schemes or other forms of subsidised purchase," he said. However, he added that the control of "windfall gains" by purchasers might be a difficult task.

Mr Fahey claimed "media imagery" over the years had given a poor image to urban local authority housing estates.

"Those who feel that such things as vandalism and crime are problems in their neighbourhood are fewer than the media imagery would lead one to expect," he said.

"There are whole tracts of flats in the urban social housing stock that are stable, attractive and in high demand among tenants. "A recent study of living conditions in local authority housing confirmed the generally positive characteristics of local authority housing provision."

Regardless of the public impression of local authority housing, the direct role of local authorities was "likely to remain large".

"In addition, local authorities at present have a broad supervisory role in relation to both voluntary housing and private rented accommodation, so that expansion of the latter would also have implications for the burden to be carried by local authorities," he said.