Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 8 May 2024

I move:

That Dáil Éireann:

notes that:

— house prices continue to spiral out of control with prices for new homes up 9 per cent last year;

— rents are also rising and have increased by 9 per cent for new tenancies and 6 per cent for existing renters in the last year;

— the Government missed their new build social housing target by 11 per cent last year;

— the Government missed their cost-rental and affordable purchase target by over 60 per cent last year;

— the Government missed their vacant property refurbishment grant target by 83 per cent last year; and

— as a consequence, thousands of social and affordable homes that were promised by the Government were not delivered;

further notes that, as a consequence of these failures:

— homelessness is continuing to increase month-on-month, up 13 per cent in the last 12 months;

— a growing number of young people are being forced to emigrate;

— a growing number of adults are forced to live at home with their parents;

— a growing number of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s are trapped in an expensive and insecure private rental sector; and

— an entire generation are locked out of affordable home ownership, and this is impacting on the economy and the delivery of public services;

furthermore, notes that:

— it is both possible and necessary to deliver homes at prices that working people can actually afford;

— this means selling new homes to eligible purchasers at prices less than €300,000, depending on size and location;

— under Sinn Féin's affordable leasehold purchase scheme:

— the State pays for all land and site servicing related costs and retains ownership of the land, and makes a further contribution, where necessary, to guarantee affordable prices and development levies are waived;

— the purchaser buys the home, at or near the full cost of construction;

— the purchaser, through a legally binding covenant, is given free indefinite use of the land which is transferable to subsequent generations of their family; and

— the purchaser is free to sell the home to another eligible affordable purchaser at the future affordable purchase price;

— the benefit of this approach is twofold, firstly, it reduces the initial purchase price of the home, and secondly, it ensures permanent affordability for subsequent buyers; and

— the aim, over time, is to create a market of privately owned, privately traded and permanently affordable homes;

agrees that:

— the best way to address the affordable housing crisis is with the delivery of an ambitious programme of affordable leasehold purchase homes;

— this would require the delivery of affordable leasehold purchase homes at scale;

— this must be delivered as part of the most ambitious public housing programme in the history of the State, including increased delivery of social, affordable, cost-rental and affordable leasehold purchase homes to meet wider social and affordable housing needs; and

— only a general election, a change of Government and a change of housing plan can deliver such an ambitious programme.

I will begin by reminding the House of the election promises made by the Minister for housing, Deputy Darragh O'Brien. In the general election of 2020, the Minister will remember that he made a clear commitment in respect of affordable housing. He said that if elected to serve in government, his party would deliver 50,000 affordable purchase homes at prices below €250,000. This is probably the greatest of the many housing promises broken by Fianna Fáil since taking office.

On his appointment to office, the Minister gave a series of interviews with radio stations in which he stated that there were going to be homes valued at or below €250,000 right across the country. In fact, he promised a plan before budget 2021 and then after it. As he knows, it was more than a year until he published that plan. Amazingly, gone was the promise of 50,000 homes at prices of €250,000 or less. In his first full year in office between 2020 and 2021, not a single affordable home to purchase was delivered by the Minister. By the end of 2020, there was not a single affordable purchase home. How many affordable purchase homes were delivered in 2022 under his plan? The answer is 323. How many affordable purchase homes were delivered in 2023? There were just 499. What is worse than the paltry number of homes delivered is the fact that the vast majority of them are not even affordable.

When I buy something, I want to know the full price. I do not just want to know what I will pay in the first instalment, I want to know price I will pay at the end. In almost every single scheme that this Minister has introduced under the affordable housing fund, the full price of the home is more than €300,000. In many cases ,the full price is even higher. In Clonburris in my constituency, the full price of the so-called affordable homes is €425,000. In Belcamp, Dublin 17, the full price is €475,000. In the Paddocks in Donabate, the full price is €500,000. The full price of a house on Station Road in Lusk is €565,000. Let that sink in for a second. On what planet is €565,000 affordable? If house prices rise, then, as the Minister knows, under the scheme the total amount that has to be paid also rises. If that is not paid back, the homeowner's children are penalised on inheritance because they inherit the debt. What the Minister has done is, once again, taken an eminently sensible idea and mangle it beyond belief. That is why people do not have trust in this Government on housing.

Meanwhile, house prices continue to rise. It is not just that the cost of a new house increased by 9% in the past year; the rate of increase is also accelerating. The average price of a new house is €330,000. It is almost impossible to buy a new house in Dublin for anything less than €400,000. The Minister’s reckless policies are pushing up house prices. It has never been harder to buy a home. That is why homeownership under his watch continues to decline, with the consequences of insecurity, hardship and immigration for tens of thousands of people.

Thankfully, there is an alternative. In 2021, we published a detailed policy document setting that out. We showed it is possible to deliver affordable purchase homes by local authorities and approved housing bodies at prices below €300,000. The Minister knows it is possible. He promised it before he was in government but then reneged on that promise.

How do you do it? It is done by separating the cost of land, site servicing, utilities and development levies from the cost of construction. The State pays the first and retains ownership - the Minister knows the policy very well - and the homeowner buys the home. The homeowner owns the home. It is theirs to alter and they can pass it on to future generations. The State gives them free, indefinite use of public land with reasonable restrictions to ensure not only affordability for the first public purchaser, but for every subsequent purchaser. Such a policy creates, year on year, a growing volume of privately owned, privately traded but permanently affordable homes.

The motion sets out very clearly Sinn Féin’s commitment if elected to serve in government. We would deliver tens of thousands of affordable purchase homes through that scheme. They would range between €250,000 and €300,000 with no hidden equity charge, no penalty for a person’s children, no loss of public land to private landlords and developers. There is no unearned windfall gain, just good quality affordable homes that working people can afford.

The Minister has broken his promises too many times. People will not be fooled again. His time is up and it is time for a Government that will deliver genuinely affordable homes, at prices working people can afford. It is time for a Sinn Féin Government. I commend the motion to the House.

Around this time five years ago, local elections took place. We heard all the talk that there was going to be affordable housing delivered on the east side of Galway city. I distinctly remember people asking about the affordable housing that was going to be delivered. Since then, in the past five years people have consistently come to me and asked when that affordable housing will be delivered. That housing has still not been delivered. In fact, no affordable housing has been delivered in Galway city.

What does that mean for young people and young families who have grown up in Galway city and want their kids and the next generation also to grow up in the communities that raised them? As we know, it can be full communities that raise young families. The reality is that they cannot afford that, they have to move out of Galway city. So many of them are stuck in houses with three generations of the same family. Many are stuck in one room where siblings and young children share beds as well as with their parents because simply they cannot afford to live anywhere else. Everybody is affected by the Minister's poor policies, the lack of delivery and specifically by his lack of delivery on affordable houses. Rents are at record highs in Galway city. This means that in Galway city once again, people can find no accommodation within the housing assistance payment, HAP, limits and young renters are forced once again to move back in with their families.

It is not just young families who are impacted. Students who are trying to come to Galway, to stay in Galway and move out of their family homes in order to experience college life, are also impacted because, unfortunately, as a result of the Minister's policies, there is no such thing as affordable student housing. Instead, we see record high rents in very fancy student accommodation that is not needed. Students themselves tell us what they need is simple, straightforward accommodation. It is high time that the Minister delivered affordable housing in Galway city.

Despite the Taoiseach’s bluster this afternoon, the Minister has failed to deliver truly affordable homes. Either he is involved in a massive smokescreen of misinformation or is so completely out of touch that he genuinely believes he is delivering affordable housing for people who are so desperate that they will jump on any of his schemes, not to get on the property ladder but to own their own home and get out of their childhood bedrooms and out of the units at the back of the houses that we see all the time. It may surprise the Minister to know that it is both possible and necessary to deliver homes at prices that working people can actually afford. This means selling new homes to eligible purchasers at prices of less than €300,000.

Here is how we will do it under Sinn Féin’s affordable leasehold purchase scheme. The State will pay for all the land, site service and related costs, retain ownership of the land and, where necessary, make a further contribution so that development levies are waived to guarantee affordable prices. This massively reduces the cost to the homeowner. The purchaser buys the home at or near the full cost of construction, and through a legally binding covenant is given free indefinite use of the land which is transferable to subsequent generations and their families. The purchaser is free to sell the home to another eligible purchaser at a future affordable purchase price. This scheme will hugely reduce the initial purchase price of the home. Second, it ensures permanent affordability for subsequent buyers. The State money does not go to private developers because under this scheme, the aim, over time, is to create a market of privately-owned, privately-traded and permanently affordable homes. It is clear the Minister is determined to carry on with failing on every housing metric. Only a general election, a change of Government and a change of housing plan can deliver an ambitious affordable housing programme.

Fine Gael has been in government for 13 years. In that time, homeownership has collapsed and 40% of people in their 30s are still living in their family homes. We know that, as of March, nearly 14,000 people were accessing emergency accommodation. More than 4,000 of these people were children.

Due to the actions and inaction of the current Government, workers and families cannot afford to buy and they cannot afford to rent. It is a vicious cycle. In my constituency, house prices have risen by 6% in Cavan and 10% in Monaghan over the past year. Year on year, rents for new tenancies have increased by 20.9% in Cavan and 13.4% in Monaghan.

I come across people all the time who are trapped in rental situations. They cannot show consistent savings because the rent is so high. As a result, they cannot get mortgage approval. They might be able to obtain a deposit somehow, but they cannot get a mortgage. Even though the rent they are paying is considerably higher than a mortgage would be, they are trapped in that situation. Other people I encounter are refusing additional hours of work because they want to remain below the social housing threshold. They know that if they go above that, they will not be able to afford rent. It is not fair.

In April, the Minister launched what is supposed to become a quarterly housing progress report. In that report, there was no update on social and affordable homes to rent or affordable purchase houses delivered in the first quarter of this year. This does not surprise me because there are no affordable houses in County Cavan. I questioned the local authority about this and was informed that are no such houses available. That leaves a range of people who cannot afford to rent and cannot afford to buy.

Sinn Féin has a plan to deliver an affordable housing scheme that workers and families can afford and that will enable councils and housing bodies to build homes that people can buy at or near the cost of construction, excluding the land-related costs. It will be open to those with a gross household income of up to €85,000. Therefore, people do not have to refuse work to stay below a social income threshold in order to live. The housing crisis will only be fixed when the cost of houses and rents are brought down by increasing supply. We are losing our young, educated and skilled staff, especially in the healthcare and social professions - our teachers and nurses - because they cannot afford to live here due to housing.

When we are all out at people's doors these days canvassing, as I am sure the Minister is as well, we meet an awful lot of people. That is where we get our information. That is when we find out what is really happening across the length and breadth of the country. I was in south Sligo at the weekend. I met a woman who moved home from abroad in the past couple of years. She lived in Dublin for a while. They are now renting a house there and paying quite high rent from their perspective. They are paying almost €1,500 per month, and they are trying to find somewhere to buy. However, to pay that higher rent and save to get a deposit to buy somewhere is practically impossible. There are so many people in that category. That is the difficulty people have across the length and breadth of the country.

Yesterday evening, I was canvassing in a place in rural County Leitrim and a woman named Áine was along with me. One girl came to the door and asked Áine if she had moved home as well and said that she knew Áine's sister had moved back. Áine replied that she had moved home and was trying to save buy a house and put down roots. These are people who have professions and are well educated. Two people we met yesterday evening were teachers who had permanent jobs in Dublin. They left those jobs because they could not afford to live there, and they moved back to the country. They could only get teaching in jobs in the country on a temporary basis, but it was better than trying to manage in Dublin because they simply could not afford the rent and saw no prospect whatsoever of ever being able to buy a house.

The affordable housing and affordable rental schemes the Minister has come up with in the past have not worked. They have failed, and there needs to be an acknowledgement of that. They have been a total and dismal failure. If the Minister wants evidence of it, he should go and talk to people on the doorsteps. Whether it is in rural areas like south Sligo or south Leitrim or in his own constituency, the Minister will find the very same thing. The only way we will resolve this issue is to come up with a plan that will work.

Deputy Ó Broin put forward a plan that will provide affordable houses for people that they can own for their lifetimes. If they want to sell them on, they can sell them at an affordable price to the next person who deserves an affordable house. It is a scheme that works in other countries. It is effective and it will provide the houses. I remember a couple of months ago in this Chamber when Deputy Ó Broin talked about a house costing €300,000. I think it was the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, who said she knew somebody who was building a house beside her that was costing a fortune. The question was asked of whether we ever watched Dermot Bannon in the evening. We are not going to get Dermot Bannon to design these houses with glass gable walls. They are going to be modest three-bedroom houses on public land that are affordable for people. That is what we need to provide. We do not need anything elaborate. We need proper homes for people. This Government has failed to provide that.

Seven years ago, the Ringsend, Irishtown, Pearse Street and Sandymount communities did a deal with the Government for the delivery of social and affordable houses on a particular site. Families and individuals in the inner city are in desperate need of housing, both social and affordable. Inner city communities have been neglected for decades. They are expected to live in conditions that are completely unacceptable. If the flats were privately owned, there would be an absolute outcry.

I was contacted by a family very recently. The mother and father are both working and paying big rent to the council each week to live in a council-owned flat. They have two girls and a boy in their mid-20s. There are five adults in a two-bedroom flat. They are a family who are steeped in the local community. The kids are involved in football and dance in the local community youth club. You could not ask for a better family. They live in a small two-bedroom flat and the ceiling is literally falling in. They have been waiting more than 15 years on the housing list for a home with a third room.

Of course, this is not uncommon because prices are making owning your own home incredibly difficult. There are so many families like this. This family feels abandoned by this Government. Ringsend and Pearse Street families have been abandoned by this Government. They do not have faith that these homes will actually be delivered as agreed on the Irish Glass Bottle site. When is the deal going to be done? When are the contracts going to be signed to deliver the social and affordable homes on that site? It is being said that one-bedroom apartments will come in at €400,000. It is absolutely bonkers to expect anybody to be able to pay €400,000.

I was really glad to hear one of the Government TDs at the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach earlier say a number of times that we should declare a housing emergency. Even the Government's own TDs are saying it. Its councillors and candidates on the ground recognise it and they are saying the same thing. The Minister needs to listen to them, but they also need to take ownership of it because they are part of a party that designed and constructed where we are today, whether that be in terms of failing to build houses or transferring €1 billion every year to the HAP scheme and all of that. Housing is the single biggest issue facing our country. How we respond now as a people to this historical challenge will resonate for generations. Sinn Féin believes in the power of housing to transform so many parts of our society and economy.

I know this Government is not serious. The reason I know that is because it has no interest in making housing affordable. I know that because its members refuse to say they want house prices to come down. They just want to build enough to appease people, but not enough to address the housing crisis or emergency. Too many people are making too much money from the current situation. They are doing so off the backs of ordinary workers and families. They are either willing to ignore the hardship people face or deny it.

Less than half of the 150 houses promised in County Mayo were built in 2023, and not a single affordable public home was built there. Sinn Féin will deliver affordable housing in every county. The Government did not even meet half of its own modest targets, but everyone suffers when the Government fails to deliver social and affordable homes. Less supply means higher house prices and unaffordable rents. These failures mean more and more of peoples' hard-earned wages being handed over to landlords and banks. It is hard to overstate the economic damage this is doing overall. The average age of the people who can buy houses is 40. This is the single biggest factor in driving the birth rate lower and lower. It is why we have a looming pension crisis. The failure of this Government to address housing and the success it had in constructing the housing crisis as it is impacting every bit of our society. I am sorry but that is a fact. This did not happen by accident. I wonder about the cost of the number of children who are homeless and the cost we are going to pay into the future.

I move amendment No. 1:

To delete all the words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following:

"notes that:

— Housing for All – A New Housing Plan for Ireland, now in its third year of implementation, sets out a comprehensive suite of actions aimed at addressing affordability in the housing sector and that supply, which is critical to achieving this, has increased significantly since its publication in September 2021;

— almost 33,000 new homes were built in 2023 alone, exceeding the target of 29,000 by some 3,700 homes, and this represents the most new homes delivered in 15 years, with a further 5,841 homes added to the national housing stock in Q1 2024;

— in the first quarter of 2024, 11,956 new homes commenced, a 63 per cent increase on the same period in 2023, and the highest number of quarter 1 commencements since the data series began in 2015; and

— the Government is providing €5.1 billion capital investment in 2024, the highest level of funding for housing in the history of the State, to accelerate the delivery of new homes and increase the supply necessary to reduce homelessness and moderate house and rental prices;

recognises that an increased delivery of social and affordable homes is at the heart of Housing for All – A New Housing Plan for Ireland and welcomes that:

— in 2023, 11,939 new social homes were delivered, surpassing the 2022 delivery figure of 10,263 social homes by 16.33 per cent, and this includes 8,110 new-build homes, 1,830 acquisitions and 1,999 homes delivered through leasing programmes;

— this delivery is the highest annual output of social homes in decades and the highest level of new-build social housing since 1975, and when the Housing Assistance Payment (8,292) and Rental Accommodation Scheme (1,542) are included, 21,773 social housing supports were delivered in 2023;

— over 4,000 affordable housing supports were delivered in 2023 via Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs), local authorities, the Land Development Agency (LDA), through the First Home Scheme, the Cost Rental Tenant-in-Situ Scheme and the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant;

— this represents an increase of 128 per cent on 2022 activity, which saw the first affordable homes delivered in a generation;

— over 1,600 cost rental homes have already been delivered by AHBs, local authorities and the LDA;

— funding is approved to support the delivery of more than 4,000 affordable homes (affordable purchase and cost rental) by 21 local authorities with the support of almost €330m in grant assistance from the Affordable Housing Fund; and

— over 7,700 Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant applications have been made, with over 4,621 already approved and 300 grants issued to date and based on current grant approvals and timelines to complete approved works, the set target of 4,000 by 2025 will be achieved in 2025;

acknowledges the ongoing efforts to secure pathways out of homelessness for individuals, families and children and notes that:

— Budget 2024 provides an allocation of €242m for homeless services, and this funding will support those experiencing homelessness with emergency accommodation and the supports that they need to exit homelessness to a tenancy; and

— in 2023, local authorities and AHBs made c. 1,300 acquisitions under the Social Housing Tenant-in-Situ scheme and the Government has approved local authorities and AHBs to acquire a further 1,300 social homes in 2024;

also notes that the delivery pipeline for new build social homes is very positive with over 22,000 homes on site or at design and tender stage; and

agrees that the continued implementation of Housing for All – A New Housing Plan for Ireland represents the most appropriate response to deal with the housing challenges which Ireland is now facing.".

I am glad to again have the opportunity to speak not only about the progress we are making under Housing for All but also to call out some of the rank hypocrisy in the Sinn Féin motion. I will begin with the progress, which is undeniable. Home building in Ireland is making a comeback, as anyone who goes to any town, village or city will see. More homes were completed in 2023 than had been since 2008. Building started on more homes in 2023 than in a decade, while in the first quarter of this year, there were 1,000 new commencements per week. That is the capacity we are building, even though there are still many issues to be addressed, which I will deal with in a moment. It is also a fact, not referred to by any of the Sinn Féin Deputies, that more first-time buyers bought a home in 2023 than had been the case in 16 years, and that Government investment and initiatives are prompting this progress. After more than a decade of undersupply, unquestionably, a lot of demand has not been met over a ten-year period, but that cannot be turned around in two, three or four years.

The tide is turning, however, and every effort is focused on growing the momentum further, as it will do this year. The recent EUROCONSTRUCT by EY shows construction output in Ireland is forecast to grow this year, whereas in other European countries surveyed, it is expected to fall by more than 2%. This does not happen by accident or by a trite motion put down in the House. It happens with real policies backed by investment. The construction sector in Ireland has the confidence, because of the Government’s housing strategies, to scale up the supply of homes because, very simply, the Government is backing families and individuals to buy them. It is doing so with record investment, of €5.1 billion this year. It is doing it through schemes such as the help-to-buy grants, about which many Sinn Féin Deputies have tabled parliamentary questions, yet their party spokesperson wants it to be abolished. The help-to-buy grant amounts to €30,000 of a person's own tax back into their pocket to help with their deposit. Approximately 45,000 individuals have claimed that grant, yet Sinn Féin would abolish it. It has said that openly, although Deputy Ó Broin’s party leader seems to disagree with him somewhat on that. That is people's own tax, which they have paid, given back to assist them with their deposit, and 45,000 households have claimed that grant.

Progress is also being led through the first-homes scheme, which is bridging the gap for thousands of buyers, providing them with the finance they need to buy their own home. As of yesterday, 9,675 had registered for that scheme, while 4,359 approvals had issued. Again, this is a scheme Sinn Féin would scrap, which has seen 4,359 approvals. It wants to get rid of the very schemes that are making housing affordable for buyers, and it is naked political opportunism at its finest, not least given Sinn Féin Deputies continue to table parliamentary questions to look for changes to these schemes it has said it would abolish. It needs to be honest with people about that.

For the Opposition to succeed, it needs housing to fail and it will do everything it can to make it fail, whether that is voting against housing developments in the Deputies' own areas and throughout the country or deliberately misleading people about the supports available to them. It sees the housing crisis as a problem to be exploited, not a challenge to be solved, and it talks our problems up and our country down. It will put forward no credible alternative, because if this motion is supposed to be a housing plan and a new departure for Sinn Féin - I will deal with the leaseholding issue in a moment - it is very light on any detail, and we are still waiting more than a year for its alternative to Housing for All. It says it will sell homes at prices below €300,000, which is great and sounds good, and in some areas we are able to do that.

Every time in this House we have asked how it would do that, however, especially in the context of the comments of its party leader about decreasing house values in Dublin to €300,000, it has not answered even the simplest of questions about how that would be done. Sinn Féin's motion today - this calls out another contradiction in its approach - refers to the waiving of development levies, when only last week it opposed the extension of the waiving of development levies. It issued a press statement criticising it, yet its motion refers to waiving development levies. Interestingly, the motion refers to its affordable leasehold purchase scheme, but we have very little detail about that, so I hope its Deputies will flesh that out. I have a number of questions I am hoping they may be able to answer for me today.

If Deputy Ó Broin has put forward the motion as a plan, he should put some detail behind it. Will he provide clarity on whether these homes would be eligible for mortgages due to the first-charge and leasehold concerns? What restrictions would be placed on the property? We know that people would not be able to freely sell their home in a leasehold position, but would Sinn Féin put in place other restrictions? Would they be prevented from doing any work, such as home renovations or extensions? Very interestingly, the Deputies never mentioned eligibility. In the most recent Sinn Féin affordable housing document I saw, which was a long time ago, there was a threshold of €80,000 on the affordable housing scheme. If that remained, it would mean ordinary workers, such as a typical garda or teacher, to whom Deputy Kenny referred, would not be eligible, but Sinn Féin has not published any eligibility criteria.

Moreover, the Deputies mentioned they would guarantee affordable prices, waive development levies and make a further contribution where necessary. What is the level of that contribution? Is Sinn Féin going to use the affordable housing fund I set up to do that? Would they waive the equity on that? Even in the case of the local authority-led affordable purchase scheme, as the Deputies will know, the State takes an equity in the home, but they have said during this debate that it would not. Effectively, therefore, there would be no stake at all on the part of the State in the property. That additional, magical contribution Sinn Féin is going to introduce to make these homes affordable appears not to have any equity stake in it. The other question is how long it is going to take Sinn Féin, if it gets into government, to stand up this scheme. What land is it going to use? Would it be this infinite resource of public land that is apparently out there? We know about its track record of objecting and voting against developments, such as Ballymastone in my area and many others I have mentioned, including the site with 253 affordable and social units and private homes as well.

Those are very basic questions Sinn Féin should be able to answer, and it should publish the finances behind it. What level of house building does it want to see? What would be the subvention and the investment by the State? It has stated within the motion that it hopes prices will fall to less than €300,000 but there is a kicker at the end, namely, "depending on size and location". Again, that is a very detailed policy document Sinn Féin has put forward. These are very legitimate questions Deputy Ó Broin should answer but, as in the case of questions I have posed previously, it has never answered them-----

-----even in respect of a very simple question as to where Sinn Féin's housing plan is.

In 2022, the first full year of delivery under Housing for All, we delivered close to 30,000 homes, 5,000 more than our target. We saw continued progress in 2023 and we are seeing it again this year, as the plan and its many reforms have gained a firm footing. In 2023, we delivered more than 32,600 new homes, the highest level of delivery in 15 years. That does not just happen. In 2023, almost 12,000 new social homes were delivered, an increase of more than 15% on 2022. A total of 10,263 were delivered in 2022 and we have upped that to almost 12,000, the highest level of delivery of new-build social housing in half a century, and we will do more of that this year. The record figures are a testament to the positive effects Housing for All is having for tens of thousands of people. More than 100,000 homes have been built under that plan.

I have always acknowledged, as I will continue to do, that times are still very challenging for those who are struggling to buy a home or pay rent, and that is why the measures we have brought forward are so important, such as delivery through the Land Development Agency, the supports through the first-home scheme, the help-to-buy grant and social homes at a scale we had not seen in 50 years. Far too many people are experiencing homelessness. That is our most pressing challenge, but Sinn Féin has not mentioned that in its motion. It is why we need to get supply up and be serious about it, which we are doing, but it has to be done on a scaled business. You do not just click your fingers and go from 33,000 homes to 60,000 overnight. Supply is key in every part of the country, as we can see. The Government has put affordability and the chance to own your own home at the heart of our housing system, and the same is true of social housing.

Of course there are still issues to be dealt with, but I would credit people with far more intelligence than Deputy Ó Broin does with his motion and its mention of a Sinn Féin affordable housing plan that no one has seen and of a leasehold interest-----

I thank Deputy Ó Broin for tabling this motion. A few short weeks ago amid the celebrations for the new Taoiseach, the Minister's Government colleague, Eamon Ryan, stated that the Minister had turned around the housing crisis. If by that he meant the Minister had turned it into a complete shambles, he was right. The figures do not lie. House prices are skyrocketing, with the price of new homes up by 9% since last year. Rents are still rising, up 9% for new tenancies and 6% for existing ones. There are missed targets in respect of cost-rental and affordable purchase homes and vacant property refurbishment grants. Homelessness has increased by a staggering 13% in the past 12 months. I could go on and on. Let us not forget the Government's failure to stop vulture funds snapping up almost entire housing estates. Does the Minister remember Belcamp Manor in Dublin 17? The vulture fund that bought those properties is charging rents of up to €3,200 per month for a family home. Imagine paying that. You could not make it up.

So far, the Minister's tenure as housing Minister has been distinguished by his ability to set even worse records on housing than any of his predecessors. In my home town of Monasterevin, which is a small town with little or no work, normal semi-detached houses are being rented for €2,000 per month. There are 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds living in their old boxrooms. I am pretty sure they do not want to be there any more than their parents do, but they have no choice. If they go out to work, they cannot afford to rent if they also have to save for a mortgage.

A few minutes ago, the Minister stated that house building was making a comeback. What a statement to come out with. It is not a fashion parade we are talking about. He also said the tide was turning. He is right, as people are sick of him. It is time for a complete change - a change of Government and a change of housing plans - and Sinn Féin will bring that change.

When I listen to the Minister, I usually try to figure out which parts of what he says he believes and which parts he does not. It is not always that easy, but I am sure there is a great deal he does not believe. He speaks of hypocrisy, but he knows perfectly well that the objections made by Sinn Féin representatives were made on the basis of affordability. Yes, there should be houses, but not for €400,000 or €500,000. That is different from the kinds of objection that people such as Councillor Seán Martin made to building houses on the Skehard Road or Councillor Seamus McGrath made to housing in Bluepool in Kanturk. There are many other examples around the country.

The Minister speaks about whether Sinn Féin somehow enjoys this housing crisis. I will tell him what I do not enjoy. When people who are above the income threshold for social housing come to my office after getting notices to quit and they ask me what their options are, I have not much to advise them of. That is the simple fact of how things are. House prices and rents are rising. God help people if they live far away from where their parents grew up, if they do not have a relationship with them or if they cannot move back in with them and they are trying to rent while also putting together money for a mortgage. God forbid if they also have children and are trying to pay for childcare. Having a permanent home of their own is completely out of their reach regardless of whether they have done everything right, as the Minister would see it, in terms of education, training and so on. For people of my generation who do not have some of the advantages enjoyed by others, having an affordable home is out of their reach.

What the Minister is dealing with in our motion is a serious proposition. Housing should be affordable, not just carry that name, and that is what Sinn Féin will deliver.

I thank Deputy Ó Broin for tabling this motion. Each time the housing crisis is discussed in the House, the Minister tries to avoid his failures by producing misleading figures. How many affordable houses have been delivered under the local authority affordable purchase scheme in Tipperary? The answer is "None". At the same time, people are facing a rental market collapse, with the standardised average rent for quarter 4 of 2023 increasing by 10% for new tenancies in Tipperary and by 7.7% for existing ones. Clonmel, Cashel and Tipperary town were particularly affected. Additionally, Tipperary had one of the highest drop-offs in newly registered tenancies at 50.3%, again limiting options. As a result, the rental market is broken and the option to purchase is hampered by a lack of affordable housing.

Young people are leaving because they cannot afford the rite of passage that so many of us took for granted, that being, to move out and seize opportunities. Instead, they are trapped in an expensive and insecure private rental sector or back at home where their opportunities are limited and they are locked out of affordable home ownership. This is impacting on the economy and the delivery of public services, yet the Government seems committed to increasing house prices to the cost of our young people and does not have the ambition to chart a way out for them.

It is possible to deliver homes at prices that working people can actually afford through our affordable leasehold purchase scheme, which would reduce the initial purchase price of the home while also ensuring permanent affordability for subsequent buyers. The State’s housing programme must be ambitious, not misleading and ineffective, as is the policy the Government is pursuing. Its policy is a failure. It missed the housing targets for last year and for 2022. People are without a home as a result. The Government is out of ideas and people are out of patience. It is time for the Government to go. The Minister loves telling us the tide has turned. I hope he is right and that, when the tide goes back out, he and the rest of the Government go with it.

The words "affordable" and "housing" rarely go together when discussing north Kildare. In north Kildare, workers are either beggaring themselves to pay extortionate rents, living at home with their parents if they are lucky, or house sharing into their 30s and 40s, with all the personal and social issues that come with that, for example, a lack of privacy and personal space, the inability to develop their own unit as couples and the inevitable delay in starting their own families. Affordable housing is not just a matter of accommodation but of how people in north Kildare are living their lives.

We constantly discuss young people and the impact of unaffordable housing on them. Their parents speak to me. No matter how much we love our kids, it can be hard going having them in the house. In case pigs are flying outside and my children are watching, I am not talking about them. Having adults of different generations - sometimes three adult generations, with babies on the way – in the same house is no way to live. Older generations are scratching their heads over the possibility of whether their children and grandchildren will be able to afford to buy houses of their own. I am talking about a home, not a property. A member of the Minister's party told me a few months ago that a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Leixlip going for a so-called discounted and affordable rent of €1,357 per month, or approximately €16,000 per year, was good value compared with New York. Do not get me wrong – Leixlip is gorgeous, is right on the border of our capital city and has a beautiful river valley running through it, but comparing a small town in north Kildare to the metropolis of New York with its nearly 9 million people shows how delusional this Government is. We are talking about homes, not properties. Homes are what make society. The market does not rule. That is the difference between the Government and Sinn Féin. The market the Government favours is killing our society.

I commend Deputy Ó Broin and the rest of my party on allowing me the parliamentary time to debate this important motion on affordable housing. We know the cost-rental and affordable purchase targets were missed by 60% last year. In fact, no affordable homes were built in my home county of Wexford. Time and again, we have seen young people's hopes dashed against the backdrop of constantly high rents, averaging €1,155 per month in my county. This amount is unaffordable to a single person or young couple, especially those on the average industrial wage. The increase of 5% in new builds in the first quarter of the year has placed a further barrier on homeownership. The sad fact is that 40% of people in their 30s are living with their parents in their family homes, with vulture funds and large corporations hoovering up homes as soon as they are at blueprint stage. This is why we need to build affordable and social homes that citizens can afford to buy or rent.

Housing is the most important issue in the State. It is heartrending to see our young people bereft of any hope of home ownership, with our finest and best becoming another part of the bloody flight of the earls. The young people we need to progress and develop our nation are leaving because they have no hope of ever getting on the property ladder. This drain on our most valuable social capital must be stopped.

Under Sinn Féin will be delivered the biggest number of public housing, cost-rental and affordable leasehold purchase homes ever seen in this State. We need to change the Government's direction and its obsession with the so-called free market and the idea that private investors will save its housing plan. They only way this will be changed is by a general election and a Sinn Féin Government.

I welcome this opportunity to debate the issue of housing in this House. Housing is consistently the number one issue of concern in communities throughout the country. It is acknowledged by the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, by the Taoiseach and by other Ministers that housing is the single biggest challenge facing the Government now. We often hear from Government benches, even while they are acknowledging that, that progress is being made and we are not unique in having issues with delivery of homes. Instead of making a serious contribution, engaging with the issues addressed in motions such as this and acknowledging where the Minister's plans are simply not working, what we see instead, time and again, are these rather cynical countermotions and the Minister and other Government spokespeople using their time in this House in responding to these motions to heap praise on Housing for All, as the Minister did tonight in a somewhat perfunctory fashion without acknowledging where it is not working. We acknowledge there are aspects of Government policies which work. We welcome interventions that are effective. Across the Opposition, that is the case. We want to see the Land Development Agency become truly effective. We want to see developments, such as the hugely important development in Poolbeg, working and delivering. We want to see construction ramped up, but we have to acknowledge there are so many people who remain locked out of housing precisely because the supply is still too low, because the Government targets are too low, and because the Government has not got sufficient ambition or urgency in tackling the housing crisis.

There are so many locked out of housing in Ireland. This is not only those on the lowest of incomes, although there are so many people who are really desperate with the cost-of-living crisis and with exorbitant rents and mortgages. If the Minister looked, and he may well have done, at David McWilliams's piece in The Irish Times on Saturday, he will have seen his account of how even those on the highest salaries, the top 5%, are squeezed and are paying more than 30% of their wages on housing. Mr. McWilliams makes the contrast with housing built in the late 19th century that was seen as affordable and he uses the example, taken, in fact, from my own constituency, of Harold's Cross Cottages, which are now for rent, and they are rare to get for rental, for €1,558 per month or well over 30% of the earnings of most people. The reality is that homes are unaffordable at all levels.

We are seeing at the sharpest end that 13,866 people were recorded as homeless in official statistics in March, including 4,174 children. It is a truly shameful figure. That excludes all the desperate people who are forced to sleep in tents, including those along the Grand Canal about whom we spoke earlier in this House who came here seeking refuge but who are sleeping in tents because the Government has made such a mess out of the asylum system and the accommodation system for refugees. That figure, large though it is, also excludes those who are fleeing family violence, sleeping on a friend’s couch or, indeed, living in a cramped childhood bedroom all through adulthood, right into their 30s and beyond.

When the Government’s countermotion passes next week, because we assume it will, the Dáil will no doubt agree with its text "that the continued implementation of Housing for All ... represents the most appropriate response to deal with the housing challenges which Ireland is now facing". We cannot sign up to that. Housing for All is clearly not equipped to deal with what are described euphemistically as our "housing challenges". The words "crisis", "disaster" and "chaos" feel far more appropriate, particularly to those we all meet every day in our communities for whom housing is the single biggest crisis. Of course, the Minister is entitled to make people aware of schemes that are up and running and which are having an impact, but it is disrespectful to all those whom I have just referenced, for whom schemes are not working and for whom the Government has not been able to do anything, to see any denial of reality by those in government.

The reality is housing is the civil rights issue of this generation and it is multi-generational. I am thinking of households such as the one I canvassed yesterday in Harold's Cross where three generations are under one roof. I spoke to a woman constituent, not much older than me, whose adult children and very small grandchildren are now living in the house in cramped conditions because they cannot afford rent and because they have been on the housing list for years with no prospect of ever getting their own home. We have multi-generational families and huge pressure caused for so many communities as a result of this. These are working people who simply cannot see a prospect of owning or renting their own home.

Increasingly, lack of access to homeownership is impacting severely upon health outcomes. It is impacting upon family dynamics for sure but it is also impacting on health outcomes, emotional well-being, and access to education because children are being moved through different schools where they have issues with housing and so many other factors.

The reality is that Housing for All is not working. It is not the appropriate response we need for this enormous crisis. The Minister is not building enough homes and his social and affordable housing targets are too low. In the past two years, the Minister has not delivered any affordable homes in Dublin city or in 15 other counties. The rights of renters are too weak, rents are still rising too fast and evictions are causing record homelessness. There is simply not enough urgency about tackling that scourge of vacancy and dereliction that we in the Labour Party have spoken about extensively and, indeed, campaigned on. The Government is too reliant on private developers to build homes and we have seen the slowing up of the planning system due to the introduction of SHDs, leading to judicial reviews of An Bord Pleanála decisions.

We have seen all sorts of obstacles to delivery but change is possible. We cannot paint such a bleak picture because it can be changed. We have seen housing developments in the past, and I referenced Harold's Cross Cottages. I have referenced previously, as David McWilliams did, the building of so many homes at a time when this State was much poorer, when we saw the Dublin Artisans' Dwellings Company delivering homes at scale that were affordable and that is the sort of political urgency that is needed now.

We need political urgency too on renters' rights. In 2021, the Labour Party introduced a Bill to end no-fault evictions, to reduce rents, and to give renters more agency over and more rights within their homes. The Government did not oppose it at the time but the Minister has not implemented it. The same year we introduced a Bill to implement the Kenny report - a long overdue measure - and cap the price of land. Indeed, recently I put forward amendments to that effect again on Committee Stage of the Planning and Development Bill 2023, but we have seen no action on that either. I have called on many occasions for the Minister to engage with us and with Focus Ireland to pass the Housing (Homeless Families) Bill 2017, produced by the Labour Party some years ago, and yet still nothing.

Continuing with Housing for All alone and suggesting it alone will get us out of the housing crisis will not work because, since publication of Housing for All, things have not improved; they have patently worsened by every objective factor. Now that we are into the depths of local election campaigning, Labour Party candidates across the country are telling me of the same issues. Indeed, I am hearing it as I canvass across the country. Housing is simply not available. There are not enough homes to buy or to rent, the ones that are there are too expensive, and those locked out of homeownership are subject to what can only be described as a rental casino.

What we need to see is real change and really constructive measures that can be introduced. All too often, the Minister and other Government spokespeople suggest the Opposition has no ideas, that we are not being constructive. In the Labour Party, we are constructive. Indeed, in March, we put forward a motion to this House suggesting a range of measures the Government could take to ramp up the delivery of homes. The Government did not oppose that motion but, again, we are not seeing action on it. The sort of actions we believe should be undertaken by the Government include the following. The Minister should increase his building targets to match the established need. I have spoken on this on many occasions. We know a minimum of 50,000 new builds is required per year. It is time the Minister stopped being in denial on this and published increased targets to try to ramp up ambition. He will say that targets are one thing and delivery is another. The problem is if targets are low, delivery will never overtake the targets. The Minister needs to set his targets high. Whether it is in sport or in any other endeavour, you need to set targets high to have any hope of achieving a scaled-up supply. We also need to see the ring-fencing of funding for accessible homes for older people and disabled people. We need to see the measures we have called for to end no-fault evictions. We need to see regulation of Airbnb-style short-term lettings, an issue which is a real factor, especially across Dublin. The Minister is aware of this too. We need to create real enforcement powers for the RTB to crack down on dodgy landlords such as Marc Godart, whose case I and others have raised on many occasions in this House. We need to see much more powerful measures provided to local authorities to tackle vacancy and dereliction and to enable them to deliver social and affordable homes as they and other entities, such as the Dublin Artisans' Dwellings Company, used do in years gone by.

This country once had one of the highest rates of homeownership in the EU.

Our social protection, pension and nursing home care systems are all predicated on an assumption of home ownership, but that is no longer the reality for so many people. The price of a home is up 9% this past year and home ownership levels are dropping. We need to ensure there are affordable homes available to people to buy and rent and we need to ensure the Government is going to scale up supply. We are all conscious there is only a relatively short amount of time left of this Government's term, but there is still time to try to genuinely change things. However, the Minister needs to engage with the Opposition on this and not simply put forward countermotions that amount to a denial there is a problem when there patently is for communities all around the country.

I move amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 1:

To insert the following after "which Ireland is now facing":

"; and

calls on the Government to introduce legislation to allow for the zoning of land for the particular use of providing affordable housing as defined in Parts 2 and 3 of the Affordable Housing Act 2021.".

We are in the middle of a housing disaster. We have record levels of rent, record house prices, record levels of adults living in their childhood bedrooms and record levels of homelessness. You would not know any of that from the Minister's contribution this evening. There was no acknowledgement of it. You would not know any of that from reading the Government amendment. That is a denial of the reality and lived experience of people’s lives right now. That denial really angers people. Can the Government not at least acknowledge the situation and how people are affected by it, rather than painting this rosy picture where everything is going well in housing and its plan is working? If there was a start made on acknowledging the seriousness of the problem, that would be the start of the kind of fixes and solutions we need on it.

On the Government’s track record on affordable housing, the Minister for housing in the previous general election promised 10,000 affordable homes every year. That is 50,000 affordable homes over the lifetime of this Government. That was the promise he made during the election campaign. In the first year of this Government in 2020, there were zero affordable purchase homes delivered. In 2021, zero affordable purchase homes were delivered. In 2022, just 323 affordable purchase homes were delivered and last year the figure was 499. Over the course of this Government there have not even been 1,000 affordable purchase homes delivered and the Minister is almost out of time, despite promising more than 50,000 affordable homes over the lifetime of this Government. That was the promise the electorate was given in the previous election.

At the same time as this massive underdelivery there has been an underspend in the housing capital budget by this Government. It comes to about €1 billion. It has either been returned in full to the Exchequer or carried over to next year, unspent in the headings it was meant to be and reallocated elsewhere. For example, in 2023, €70 million allocated by this Government to spend on affordable housing was reallocated elsewhere. Consider what that could have done to make a very real improvement in people’s lives. When we are talking about this, what should be at the forefront of our minds is the human impact this is having and the lack of stability for families. When you are talking to people who are unable to access housing or are very worried because they cannot get somewhere affordable and secure to live, they are thinking about how this is going to affect their children. They wonder whether their children are going to have to be moved out of their school. They may have a child with learning difficulties who they have fought every step of the way to get help and support for. It can take them years to get this. They can succeed in getting this with really hard work and good support from SNAs and teachers, but because they cannot get access to affordable, secure housing, they are afraid of how it is going to set back their child if they have to be moved from their school, make new friends and settle back in. This is, of course, having huge impacts on small businesses and our economy. It is having huge impacts on our healthcare service and the ability to retain much-needed healthcare staff, including nurses and carers. It is impacting on our older people who need support in their home if they are not able to get access to the healthcare and the support from carers they need because of the housing disaster this Government is presiding over.

One of the things that really strikes me when I go around the communities I represent is meeting people who tell stories of how the social or affordable purchase home they got maybe 50 years ago had a transformative effect on their lives. They tell me with real pride how they were able to get embedded in the community, get involved in the GAA club or community organisations and raise their children who were then able to thrive. They tell me what their adult children are doing and the contribution they are making because of the great impact being able to access affordable or social housing had for them. This is something we should never lose sight of, even though people are despairing. We must never lose sight of what was achieved here in the 20th century in terms of lifting people out of poverty, getting them into good quality housing in thriving communities and the impact that had once people were clear of the terrible housing conditions in the slums and tenements.

What are the solutions to this? One solution the Social Democrats put forward has been voted down by the Government on Committee Stage of the Planning and Development Bill, but it is not too late because that Bill has not concluded its passage through the Oireachtas. The Government could, therefore, accept our constructive solution on this in the form of affordable housing zoning, which is something that works well in other countries. It has been done in Vienna, for example. There an affordable rental two-bedroom apartment, built in the last couple of years, can be rented for €625 per month. We can compare that with an affordable rent here. Affordable housing zoning is part of the measures that permit that. We have put forward constructive solutions and I urge the Government to accept our solutions, accept the proposals we put forward for the Planning and Development Bill and accept the amendment I have moved this evening. Affordable housing zoning would help the situation. It is not the answer to everything.

The Minister has articulated the concerns he has with the Sinn Féin proposal on affordable housing with respect to the leasing of land and so on. If he does not like that, why not accept the Social Democrats’ proposal for affordable housing zoning? It would achieve many of the same things like ensuring there was more land available at affordable prices for affordable housing. It would also lock in affordability so a person could not just sell an affordable home, it goes onto the private market and in time ends up being unaffordable. Our proposal would determine affordability per square metre either as an affordable rent or for affordable purchase. This is what is done in other countries. It rises in time in line with the consumer price index because, of course, prices will need to rise, but they remain affordable. It would deal with the concerns the Minister has about what happens if someone builds an extension to their house. As this is per square metre, if a person builds an extension, the value of that house will go up in line with the extension. I urge the Minister to take on board the constructive solutions we are putting forward and not to vote them down like he did on the Planning and Development Bill.

We have, as I said, a good history with respect to what was done with housing in the 20th century. In Marino in my constituency, affordable purchase homes were built 100 years ago and it is a thriving community to this day. It is very successful. The open spaces were very well-designed. It is a great pleasure to meet people who live there and say their grandparents bought the home 100 years ago and the family has lived in it the whole way through as they have been able to keep it. However, if we look at the land costs for that housing in Marino, in the first phase the land cost for 231 houses was £4,794. The cost per house was thus £20 per house and the overall cost of construction was £589 per house. The land cost was therefore 4%. Looking at the land costs under this Government, we are talking about 20% and it can be more.

In effect, the land cost is even more than that 20% because there are also the financing costs, the developer margin and so forth. Affordable housing zoning would get these land costs down and I urge the Government to accept our proposals in that regard. These are concrete measures that have been proven to work in other countries. Why would the Government not accept these proposals? If the Minister is genuinely committed to affordable housing and genuinely wants to see his targets met, something this Government has never done, why would he not adopt the constructive proposals we are putting forward that have been proven to work in other countries? Why would he oppose them? I do not understand that. I hope he will accept our amendment to the motion and our amendments on Report Stage of the Planning and Development Bill 2023. I hope he will take on board these proposals, which would make housing in Ireland more affordable.

I welcome the motion and thank Deputy Ó Broin for his continuing work on the ongoing crisis in housing. The cutting edge of the last general election was housing and it will also be the cutting edge of the upcoming general election. Housing has been the standout issue for many people. Some people are directly affected, perhaps because they are in a situation of homelessness and just cannot find a place to rent, and there are some people it does not affect. However, the corrosive effect of 14,500 people in emergency accommodation affects everybody. It is a stain on this country that we cannot give people shelter and their own door, putting them under the terrible stress that comes with living in a hotel. In the distant future, we will look back on this time when children had to live in hotels and will see the damage it did to them. It is just not acceptable.

I will touch on a number of things regarding the issue of affordability, which was discussed earlier. There is a scheme in Clondalkin, the Clonburris affordable dwelling purchase scheme. The average affordable home in that scheme costs €320,000. That is the average. The average industrial wage in Ireland is €50,000 per year so I do not know how these homes can be affordable to people who are on the average wage. It is impossible if you are on the average wage and, even if you are on the average industrial wage, it is very difficult. It is highly questionable whether these affordable housing schemes are affordable for most workers.

You could go on forever about the issue of rent but I will pick two areas I am very familiar with in Dublin Mid-West, Lucan and Clondalkin. I will focus particularly on Lucan. The average cost to rent a three-bedroom house in Lucan is now €3,000. Who can afford that? I do not know how anybody can afford to pay €3,000 in rent. It is just absolutely impossible for the average person to rent even a three-bedroom house.

We can see the corrosive effect this is having. The knock-on effect is that many highly qualified, highly motivated and highly educated young people are now weighing up their options. They want to live in Ireland. They want to live near their family and so forth but they are working and not earning a bad wage and yet cannot find a place to live or rent a house. Young people are now leaving, although we hope they will come back, because they just cannot find a place to live that is affordable and reachable. As I have said, this is having a very significant effect on a great number of young people.

Obviously, there is also a great number of people doing very well out of the housing industry. Many millionaires have been manufactured by the homelessness industry. Individuals who own hotels or bed and breakfast accommodation have become millionaires overnight. They have become very wealthy out of this misery. Over €1 billion of State money goes to private landlords per year. If you do the sums, you will see that €1 billion would construct a lot of houses but all of this money is going towards enriching private landlords. I am by no means saying that all landlords are bad but this money could be better spent on improving affordability, sociability and availability. That is the key to what we are talking about.

I will make a final point. I have heard a lot about the Kenny report. I hope I will be corrected if I am wrong but this report was published in 1973. As far as I know, it was produced by a special committee of the Oireachtas. The main proposal of the report was that the State should intervene in the market for land and that it should not be a speculative market. The Kenny report proposed that the State would control the price of building lands in the interest of the common good. I am no expert in the matter but, if we implemented that, prevented speculation on land and ensured it was used for the common good, surely we would not be in the position we are in, where this crisis seems to be getting worse rather than better and where our young people are emigrating. It is not like what happened in the past, when people emigrated because there were no jobs here. There are jobs here but there is nowhere to live. There is no affordability for people who want to live in a city or suburb and not to live in their ma and da's house any more.

This is a stain that will be hard to erase. When people feel very aggrieved, as many people do in respect of housing, they will punch people like the Government, as they did in the last general election and as I believe they will do in the next general election.

I welcome the opportunity to speak about housing. I will first wish the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, well in his position. It is the first time I have met him across the floor. As a fellow coming from the west of Ireland, I know he will do his best to bring houses there.

I will start with the affordable housing scheme. I spoke to the Ministers, Deputies Michael McGrath and Donohoe, about this in committee earlier. The affordable housing scheme as it is currently constructed is not working outside of major growth centres. In County Galway, Tuam, which the Minister of State will know well as our county town, and Ballinasloe are two large towns with plenty of infrastructure. However, the affordable housing scheme will not work in these areas because the cost of building houses is such that intervention by the Government will not make them affordable. I am hearing this from the local authority; I am not making it up. I ask that the Government review the affordable housing scheme to ensure it catches a bigger area.

The second issue I have a gripe with is the fact that, when we are doing our local area plans, the Office of the Planning Regulator has too much influence over what we do in local areas. We are all constrained by what is called the core strategy. In my view, not half enough land is being zoned for residential and industrial uses in our local areas. While we are reducing the amount of land we are zoning, we are increasing the price, making houses more expensive. We should be a bit freer with how we zone our lands for residential purposes.

In my own constituency of Galway East, there are 33 proposals for wastewater treatment plants in towns and villages. Not one has been delivered. This is because Irish Water has no interest in our towns and villages. It is more interested in our cities and centres of population. We are frozen out of building houses in villages such as Corofin, Abbeyknockmoy, Craughwell and Ardrahan because An Bord Pleanála has said that any proposals to build houses in those areas are premature until there is a municipal wastewater treatment plant in place.

At the same time, we are putting pressure on people not to live in rural areas and putting every kind of barrier in place, be it environmental, related to traffic or whatever else. We are muddling all of the plans we have by putting constraints when we should be loosening the reins.

We also need to give far more autonomy to our local authorities when they are building social houses. They will build them faster if they are allowed to build them rather than having to check back with the Department for approval at every stage in the development. This is adding years to the life cycle before we build these houses which are needed.

The Croí Cónaithe scheme is beginning to work and local authorities are starting to get used to dealing with it. A few improvements could be made to the scheme. First-time buyers of a vacant property should qualify for the help-to-buy scheme as well as the refurbishment scheme in order to help them get on to the property ladder and to give them an incentive to buy vacant properties and convert them into homes in our towns and villages.

We need to take a serious look at payments under the Croí Cónaithe scheme. No money is paid out until the house is habitable. This is creating an undue financial burden on people who want to do up an old house. They have to finance thew work first and wait to draw down the money. There should be a structure in place to make interim payments when certain works are carried out to help with cash flow and make the process more attractive.

The private housing sector is the most dysfunctional sector. We are not building private houses and we need to have a serious look at that. A previous speaker referred to the Kenny report. We need to set up an expert task force to determine how to kickstart the private housing market because it is defunct at the moment.

I congratulate the Minister of State also on his recent elevation and wish him the best of luck in his position.

I will speak on affordable housing and housing in general. We have an affordability issue across the board. There is no doubt we have entered into a very different period in the past five to seven years, particularly post-pandemic, as regards the economic and regulatory environment and sustainability and affordability. A large number of the current difficulties, although not all of them, are being driven by Government policy. The first area, which is largely dysfunctional at this stage, particularly in respect of private housing, is planning. The planning guidelines that are being observed and that are soon to be made mandatory include density requirement for many urban areas, and even some less urban areas, of 50 units per hectare. This is not marketable, bankable or buildable, yet we continue to with this. In my area of Waterford city and its environs, which is not a densely populated area, we are looking at 50 units per hectare. Every developer now has to look at putting in apartment blocks. People in Waterford do not want to live in apartments. They were all born in houses and there is room to build houses. They would like to live in small two- and three-bedroom houses, not apartment blocks.

The cost of financing an apartment complex is completely different from the cost of financing a house. All of the certification has to be done and all of the stairwells and every single apartment have to be finished before the complex can be signed off and handed over. That is creating a huge strain, with the result that builders are deciding to leave these high-density developments. We have zoned lands in Waterford and a number of strategic housing developments have been approved but nothing has started. That is part of the problem.

We also have a significant issue with planning appeals and observations. I was with a private developer recently who has three separate sites in the south east, all of which are being held up by planning observations. He told me it is taking, on average, five years from the acquisition of land to selling the houses on site. That is not marketable either.

I was in Limerick recently where I met a large development company. Its biggest problem is finance. It could double its output within 12 months but it cannot get lines of finance to support its business. We basically have two banks which are, mar dhea, lending to builders but only if they come along with 30%, 40%, or 50% of the equity to try to drive a project. We need a functioning finance agency to support private housing because it is delivering most Part 5 housing other than local authority schemes.

I ask the Minister of State to look at Irish Water and the ESB and all the certifications required before a house can be handed over. The bureaucracy involved in building a house is nuts, both for private developers and local authorities. Private developers are frustrated at this stage and many who have been a long time in the business are scaling back and building a small amount of housing because it is too difficult and they are fed up with it.

As regards the Land Development Agency and the Housing Finance Agency, I spoke to a developer recently who took housing finance because he thought it would help him to get on to a tenders' list for local authority housing. By the time conveying and everything else was finished, it had taken him twice as long to finish out on the site because he had to go back each time and get approval for the following stage and drawdown.

This is not working. As has been said many times in the House, the Minister needs to review policy. It is not rocket science. We could build 100,000 houses a year during the Celtic tiger era. While I accept that we built badly in some instances, we built many very worthwhile housing developments. It can be done and the industry can do it but policy is not helping. I ask the Minister to look specifically at planning policy which is a huge blockage to delivering the housing targets we need.

I, too, will speak on this motion which proposes delivering homes at prices that are within the reach of working class people. The proposals suggest that new homes could be sold to eligible buyers for less than €300,000, with the exact price varying based on the size and location of the home. However, the motion does not elaborate on how Sinn Féin plans to deliver a fully constructed home for under €300,000. It is a fantasy.

The motion mentions Sinn Féin's affordable leasehold purchase scheme under which the State would cover all land and servicing costs, retain ownership and make additional contributions to ensure affordable prices for developments. However, it does not specify who would build these houses. It is unlikely that the Sinn Féin TDs would be involved in the construction process, which suggests that the private sector, including builders and contractors across the country, would be responsible. However, if a project is not viable for them, they will not build. That is a simple fact, as Deputy Shanahan just said. The obstacles and blockages in place include planning permission, planning regulations, new energy regulations that drive up costs, high VAT rates and other State-imposed costs associated with building a home. The Irish Home Builders Association stated that the Government takes up to 41% of the total costs of houses in Dublin and 39% of total costs in the country by way of taxes. We can round that figure off at 40%.

Where is the Government going here? It says it has an emergency in housing, as we all know it has, but why does it not deal with it and cut 20% off that cost straightaway? Instead, it has added costs by deciding to put up the minimum wage, have more bank holidays and extra sick days and provide for leave if there is distress in the home. Where is it going to stop? No one in the Government or Opposition knows what it is like to run a small business, to be an employer or to be self-employed. It is a sad situation. The Government is adding costs all of the time. These are lovely things to roll out.

Last week, Deputy Bacik said she wanted the five days' paid sick leave extended to 15 days. How is a small employer, whether a plumber, plasterer, blocklayer, roofer, carpenter - you name it - who is employing three or four men, going to manage these costs? How in God's name will that happen? Pinch yourselves please and think of the employer for once. Small employers employing five to ten people are trying to carry all these costs and are living with all of this downright blackguarding of stupid legislation.

It looks lovely and very sexy for selling to the public and for trade unions and of course the NGOs, but there will not be any people in business because they will not be able to do it because they will not be able to pay and will not make ends meet. What happens the employer or the small business then if they have a problem getting paid, which many do? They get no mercy from the taxman, unlike RTÉ that can get preferential and special treatment with €50 million put away in a contingency fund and may be able to settle with Revenue but no employer is going to get that. Will the Government cop itself on, get rid of all the advisers and just go out to meet the small businesses and get to understand the problems?

There is also the problem with mica and pyrite. What happens? A major conglomerate's quarries caused 95% of that and it runs off scot-free but a 5% levy is put onto concrete, which again drives up the cost of houses. Everything done by this Government and the previous Government has added costs and more costs.

I will now turn to the local authorities and Uisce Éireann. The villages of Caisleán Nua, Goldenbridge, Lisvernane, Kilsheelan, Bansha and others all over the place cannot add a single house because they have no capacity in the sewerage plants. One might as well be writing to Santa Claus at Mount Everest as be writing to Irish Water because it is useless. We have a huge problem with water supplies. Clonmel is the biggest inland town in the country and all we get at the weekends is outages and more outages. Irish Water does not even know where the pipes are. When it does know, it will not maintain or service them. It is now talking about cutting off a wonderful supply that we have had for generations from Poulnagunoge in Contae Phort Láirge, near Cluain Meala, up in the mountain. It is a lovely source of supply and it never stops. Now they want to disconnect that and pump the water from Glenary and back into the town and up the hill again. Kindergarten children would not carry on like it. There is a lovely reservoir up there as well that was built by the British Army. It was built to perfection and yet they will not use that. It is short-sighted. The Government has just set up agencies such as the Land Development Authority and a planning authority, all of which makes it more bureaucratic and more cumbersome, and then it hands the whole thing over to Irish Water, which was a major disaster.

The Government is not going to build these houses. They will not be delivered and people will not have the homes.

I wish the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, the best of luck in his new role. At the outset I must say that I am a block layer and a building contractor. I have been in the building sector all my life. One thing the Government never sees is the person who wants to buy his or her own house and we all hope that down the line, our children will be in a position to buy their own house. Do people realise that up to 40% of their mortgage is tax? For people in this country to be able to afford a mortgage, they have to have a wage that can afford a mortgage. To afford a €300,000 mortgage, for example, they have to show in their accounts that they have excess income in a month of up to €3,000 - and this is after they pay for everything else. They are paying tax on their wages if they want to qualify for a mortgage, then when they qualify for their mortgage they pay for it over the next 25 or 30 years, and 40% of the money they borrow for the mortgage for the roof they put over their own heads is tax. Does this make sense to anyone? A person who is working and paying tax now has to borrow for a mortgage and 40% of the mortgage goes back to the Government again on tax. Where is the reward in that? Does it make business sense to anyone? Can anyone make sense of that?

Consider the block-laying levy that was due to the scandal of pyrite throughout the country. We have had mica and pyrite affecting the people of Donegal and right down through the country. The quarries were shown where the mica and pyrite was. What did the Government do to the people of Ireland? It said "We will solve this and we will make sure we cover the money to repair your houses, so we will put a 5% levy - tax - on all the people who want to rebuild a house or do up a house for the way forward for themselves." Then, as the same companies have given us four increases of up to 30% over the last 18 months to two years, the costs have risen. Where once a cubic metre of concrete cost €80 now it is in excess of €120 but it depends on the day one calls. It has gone up €40 a metre. Therefore, we are paying extra tax for the levy for something people had nothing to do with and now we are paying extra tax on the increases on materials. Because of the green policies, anything that is oil-based in this country is taxed. This includes silicone, or any other materials that are oil-based, including the insulation for a house. The taxes on these are all increasing.

Anyone in this country who has a child, a grandchild, a brother or a sister and who wants to put a roof over their heads is now paying 40% tax on top of the tax we pay when we work. Is that something a Government should be proud of? Where is the reward for somebody who works in this country? Where is the reward for somebody who wants to put a roof over their own head in this country? Where is the reward for an employer who is teaching people trades in order that they may be able to put a roof over their own heads? Where is the reward for any of that? There is none. All the Government has done is create inflation on top of inflation. These people who work and pay their taxes know there are vulnerable people in the State who cannot work and they do not mind paying their fair share but the Government is taxing them out of existence.

The Government is also taking 50% in tax from the fuel used by someone going to work. Not only is the Government taking tax off their wages now it is also taking tax on the fuel they use to get to work. The person who works in this State is actually working to pay tax. Do they see any benefits for themselves afterwards? No, they do not. Do they see the benefits for the people who are vulnerable? Yes they do, but not everyone in this country wants to work because the Government has made it so comfortable for them to stay at home. That is a big problem and the Government is putting all the taxes back on the people who are working. This is something for us to think of. If the Government reduced the taxes on the houses and on all the materials, we would then have people who would not mind working in this country because they would not have to spend 40% of their income back in tax and as our mortgages might actually be a little bit cheaper, people might be able to afford it and knock five years off the struggle to put a roof over their own heads.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this and I thank Sinn Féin for the motion. Although I have great difficulties with the concept in the motion, I welcome the opportunity to speak to it and to focus again on the problem of housing. In Galway city, people are waiting 20 years. I do not need to exaggerate. People are 20 years on a waiting list in Galway city. The last time we built a house there was in 2009. I keep saying this. An otherwise very good article in The Irish Times by Cliff Taylor and Shauna Bowers set out the multitude of schemes for housing. It was excellent and they pointed out that every year, €8.3 billion is going on housing and yet we have 13,866 people homeless including 4,147 children. If €8.3 billion per year is going out then by any stretch we should have our housing problem solved but instead of that, it is getting ever worse. The only issue I had with Cliff Taylor's article was that he said there were no other options because we had to go down the road of housing assistance payments, HAP. We went down the road of HAP in 2013 or 2014 first as a pilot project and then as the only game in town. Therein is the nub of the problem. Houses were not built. No social or public housing was built from the time HAP came in and previously in Galway from 2009 and then onwards with HAP. Between HAP, the rental scheme and the other schemes there is almost €1 billion per year going out on that scheme, not to mention the whole range of other schemes that The Irish Times set out. It was the best layout I have seen. My difficulty with all of this is we made the home into a product a long time ago. The most basic unit of society, that we have shelter, was made into a product to be bought, sold and traded on the market. As a result, now we have an absolute madness.

We have had a task force in Galway since 2019. The chairperson, who seemingly did her best, has now gone on to better things and we have a new chair - both former Secretaries General.

At the meeting in September, the chair said she was underwhelmed at the delivery, after five years of the task force, and she was worried that there was a loss of momentum. In the November meetings of the task force - bear in mind that it has never once produced a final report but has just produced ongoing minutes and ongoing reports - she told us that the chair conveyed her concern and disappointment at the projected figures for social housing for 2023. Regarding affordable housing, five years later, it was reported that Galway city and county councils have no delivery in 2022 or 2023. Galway is the only city with no delivery to date.

There is public land in Galway but because of the multitude of approaches from this Government and previous Governments, we have failed to build public housing on public land full stop - no other variation. Public housing to the highest standard on public land is essential to bring down house prices. Talking about affordable housing in this manner and bringing back landlords in terms of long-term leasing is an effort in desperation because the crisis is so bad. What we want the Minister to do is acknowledge that his schemes have all failed other than keeping house prices artificially high. I am very grateful to the Simon report, which provides constant quarterly snapshots. Remember HAP, which was the only game in town until very recently. No premises are available in Galway under either the discretionary or normal rate of HAP. This is a thriving university city with three hospitals and two universities but there are no properties to rent under the only game in town yet we persist with one scheme and another scheme such as shared equity and help to buy, which is costing a fortune and helping consultants to buy a house. Fair play to them but if a consultant in this country cannot buy a house on the open market, there is something seriously amiss with our housing policy that we have to help people with that kind of salary to buy a house. There is a fundamental class distinction when it comes to the way we deal with public housing. Public housing is good. It brings benefits all around and we should be doing that. In the meantime, we can use some of the other schemes to help us out of the crisis but with a vision and a plan. For the last time, I ask that we get a comprehensive report from the task force in Galway.

The state of housing in this country is an absolute disgrace. We have been in crisis mode with a severe lack of affordable housing for years now and despite this, the Government still fails to act and take the drastic action that is so desperately needed.

I have been contacted by many constituents in Donegal who are facing dire situations. These are people who are having to choose between paying the rent or paying the bills; people who are being evicted from their homes at short notice with nowhere to go and no alternative rental accommodation available in the county; people whose family homes are crumbling because of defective blocks and who are stuck between living in a crumbling house or becoming homeless; young people who will never be in a position to buy and who are forced to move to another country in order to secure their own home; older people who are trapped in insecure rental accommodation and some of the hundreds of homeless people across the north west who are unable to find any shelter or assistance from this Government.

In January, homelessness in Donegal had risen by 10% while 13,866 people were registered as homeless in Ireland in March, another new record for the Government. Of these, 172 were in the north west. This number does not include those sleeping on our streets or couch surfing. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage has on many occasions said that tackling the issue of homelessness is a Government priority. Why then do the numbers only continue to rise? We watch as a record level of homelessness is reached each month with the Government breaking its own homelessness records time and time again.

It is clear that Housing for All is not working. The housing situation has only got worse under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. This Government gives me no hope that the situation will ever get better. The fact that the Minister cannot even meet the incredibly low standard that he sets for his Department is worrying.

It is clear that the problem is an ideological argument. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael do not see providing housing as a Government responsibility. "The market will provide" is their mantra. This Government has made our country completely unlivable. We need to start to undo the damage of decades of bad Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael housing policy and it is clear that this cannot be done under this Government.

I support this motion’s call for a change of Government and for a far more ambitious housing plan, however, I am sceptical that Sinn Féin fully grasps the level of drastic change that is necessary to achieve such ambitious targets. I am certain about one thing though - change is needed. Over-reliance on subsidies such as the Government’s help to buy and first home schemes only maintains high prices. We need full and proper investment in supplying affordable homes for everyone. The failure of Government housing policy has created a crisis of unprecedented proportions - a crisis that requires drastic change and significant investment, both of which this Government refuses to provide.

In my brief two minutes, I will make a few points about the housing situation in the north west. First of all, the ceiling for the first home scheme for Sligo is €325,000. However, at present, there are no new builds in Sligo for €325,000, therefore, there are no new homes in Sligo that are eligible for this scheme. The ceiling price of €325,000 remains unchanged for Sligo since January 2023 yet if we look at the increase in house prices in Sligo and Leitrim for 2023, we can see that it is 7.7%. While the scheme is an important and good one, nobody can avail of it in Sligo so I ask the Government to look again at the ceiling prices and ensure that they reflect the reality of the housing market.

I also want to raise the overall issue of the number of new dwelling completions in the north-west region. According to 2023 figures, we have 17% of the population yet the CSO told us that we have only 11% of housing completions whereas if we look at the eastern and midland regions with 40% of the population, we can see they have 65% of housing completions. We need a much greater regional spread in house building. The Minister keeps saying that supply is key. He is right but the supply is not coming on stream for the northern and western regions and it is no wonder you cannot get a new build for €325,000 and that rents have skyrocketed. The recent RTB report last week showed that Sligo, Roscommon and Donegal were in the top seven counties with the highest rent increases for 2023 in new tenancies. Anybody in Sligo looking to rent a home has seen a €300 increase per month in the last quarter of 2023 and anybody looking to buy a new home cannot avail of the first home scheme. Supply is key but supply is way behind in the region.

I welcome the opportunity for the House to focus on people whose lives are literally falling apart outside these doors because they cannot find a home, cannot find security, and therefore, cannot find stability. What I hear from people, which I am sure many Members also hear day and day out, is "we have no home, we have no hope". What they have in abundance due to years of lack of supply of housing is frustration and anger and they are riddled with fear about what is going to happen them, their children and their relationships. Families are trapped in one room in emergency accommodation, there is a waiting list for access and the numbers keep rising.

One affordable housing purchase scheme has been approved to date by the Government in County Clare. It consists of ten units in Shannon. When it was announced months ago, I said that it equated to one house for every 1,000 of the population in Shannon. As we know, it has now exceeded 10,000. I am aware of two further applications. I know the Minister is aware of the number of parliamentary questions I submitted on the matter in recent months to ascertain whether the applications had been received by his Department from Clare County Council and whether they had been approved. I would have thought that this would have been fast tracked and expedited - whatever it would take to get this moving instead of months of going backwards and forwards - so it would be great to get clarification from the Minister if he comes back for the second round or the closing statement.

In October 2023, the Minister stated that he was open to extending the scheme beyond Ennis and Shannon to west and north Clare. These areas that have seen few, if any, new housing developments - in some cases, for decades. In light of that being six months ago, I was hoping that the Minister might provide some clarification about that.

I wish to raise the matter of a 30-unit social housing proposal for Ennistymon that received pre-planning funding approval from the Department in October 2022. It is now being paused due to infrastructural water constraints. What is going to be done there? Many towns and villages in County Clare have the same constraints.

I want to acknowledge and thank all those who have contributed to this evening's debate. I want to echo the comments made earlier by the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, and reassert the Government's commitment to tackling the challenge in the housing sector. We know the challenges are having a real impact on people's lives and on the nation as a whole. We understand the urgency and the need to ensure people have safe, secure and affordable homes. We do not underestimate the scale of the challenge and we are putting in the work day in, day out to address the challenges and implement the policies, plans and schemes to steer the country out of this housing crisis.

The motion Deputy Ó Broin and his party have tabled for this evening's debate, coupled with the Deputy's recent commentary, do not fairly represent the efforts and progress the Government has made. The Deputy makes the point that we need to increase social, affordable and cost-rental accommodation and on this point we certainly agree. The Government is doing just that. Nearly 12,000 new social homes were delivered in 2023. This represents a significant increase on delivery in 2022 with an increase of 16.3%. More importantly, it is the highest delivery of new build social homes - 8,100 - in half a century. When the housing assistant payment, HAP, and the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, are included, 22,773 social housing supports were delivered in 2023. We delivered more than 4,000 affordable solutions in 2023, more than doubling our activity in the previous year. It is important to note that in 2022 delivery from a standing start provided the first affordable homes in a generation. Our ambition is to deliver even more. Budget 2024 secured funding for an additional 6,400 affordable homes. It is imperative that we work with the local authorities and redouble our efforts to deliver more affordable homes.

The Deputy mentioned increasing rents, but omitted to mention that more than 1,600 cost-rental homes have already been delivered by the Government and that there are a further 1,400 plus cost-rental homes in the pipeline. The Deputy neglected to mention the more than €675 million of cost-rental equity loan funding, supporting the delivery of more than 3,250 cost-rental homes by approved housing bodies, AHBs. The Deputy also neglected to mention the secure tenancy affordable rental investment scheme, STAR, introduced by this Government, which aims to invest in the delivery of more than 4,000 cost-rental homes by 2027. The Deputy said that this Government is not doing enough, but it is clear that through the implementation of Housing for All, we have securely laid the foundations and built the pipeline that will allow us to continue to ramp up delivery in the coming years.

I have heard a lot of commentary about the targets being too low. Housing for All is an evidence-based living policy that is agile by design and is under continuous review. When the research currently being undertaken by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, is presented to the Government, the targets set out in Housing for All will be updated. The setting of targets is one thing, building actual homes is another. Since this Government took office in 2020, more than 100,000 new homes have been delivered and that is a fact .

The Deputy said that this Government is not spending the money to fix the housing crisis. The fact is that a record €5.1 billion in capital investment in housing was approved by Government in budget 2024. This present level of capital funding is the highest ever in the history of the State and will ensure that we continue to deliver at pace new affordable homes for purchase and rent.

With regard to the Deputy's affordable leasehold purchase scheme, there is no real detail provided in the motion that would suggest Sinn Féin can achieve house prices in the region of €300,000. As someone who represents the Dublin region, let us see his costed detail for a home in the capital. Furthermore, there is no indication of the cost of the State of such a proposal. On the other hand, Housing for All includes a comprehensive suite of measures that address the viability gap and improve the affordability of housing. Two these are the help to buy scheme and the first home shared equity scheme. The Deputy claims that these schemes only appear to help Irish people buy their first homes. I think the 30,450 first-time buyers who were approved for mortgages last year may disagree with the Deputy on that claim. In particular, the first home scheme has proven to be a key support for first-time buyers. The scheme continues to support first-time buyers and other eligible home buyers in purchasing new homes and apartments in the private market. In addition, since September 2023, the first home scheme now supports those who wish to build their own home.

There were 809 approvals and 262 homes purchased under the first home scheme in Q1 of 2024 alone. Approvals are up by 38% compared to Q1 of 2023. Given the success of the scheme to date, we have committed an additional €40 million to it, continuing to drive affordable homeownership for our citizens.

Regarding the help to buy scheme, to date, 47,496 claims have been made, of which 46,599 have been approved. The Sinn Féin motion states that the Government has missed its vacant property refurbishment grants targets by 83% last year. I think the Deputy needs to know that statement is certainly disingenuous in regard to the number of applications.

More than 7,700 grant applications were made with some 4,600 already approved and 300 issued. Deputy Ó Broin knows better than most that the grant is paid upon completion of work. That is a critical point. The Deputy knows that the local authorities conduct a final property visit to ensure the works have been completed in line with the grant applications approved. It is imperative that this is done to ensure the correct checks and balances are in place. The Deputy knows that then, and only then, the grant is paid by the local authority, once it is satisfied that all scheme conditions have been met. The Deputy also knows the drawdowns will increase significantly throughout 2024 as more refurbishment works are completed. Based on the current grant approval and timelines to be completed on approved works, the set target of 4,000 homes will be achieved in 2025. The Government has delivered unprecedented levels of new homes, including the ramping up of social and affordable homes delivery.

We are not stopping there, with record levels of commencements and planning permissions granted, the progress made since the publication of Housing for All is evident. The most important action is to build new homes and we have exceeded the overall Housing for All targets to date. In 2022, the first full year of delivery under the plan, we delivered close to 30,000 new homes, 5,000 more than was outlined in our target. Progress continues in 2023, and we see further growth this year as the plan and its many initiatives have gained a firm footing.

In 2023, we delivered more than 32,600 new homes. This is the highest level of delivery in more than 15 years. There were construction commencements on almost 33,000 homes in 2023. This is the highest number of commencements since records began a decade ago. This March alone, building began on 4,900 new homes, bringing the total just shy of 12,000 commencements for the first quarter of 2024. This is a record high for the first three months of this year and an increase of 63% compared to the same period last year. Furthermore, 2023 CSO data on planning permissions show that nationally planning permissions were granted for 41,225 new homes in 2023. This is an increase of 21% on 2022.

We are not resting on our laurels as challenges still remain. Homelessness is a serious concern for the Government. There is no shortage of will and determination to deal with this issue and it remains the top priority for the Government. We are working with all local authorities to reduce the numbers of people in emergency accommodation and ensuring that local authorities allocate increased numbers of social homes to households in emergency accommodation.

I reiterate that Housing for All is working. We have achieved much since the plan was published and we know there is still a long road ahead. We will continue to do everything in our power to increase affordability, improve the rental market, eradicate homelessness, address vacancy and fix the housing system for our children, grandchildren and generations to come.

The reason that not only do we have an ongoing housing crisis but it is getting worse is quite simple. The Government has set targets for social and affordable housing that are far too low and year-on-year they have managed to miss these targets. To give some solace to the Minister of State, I can tell him one target that it did actually meet in 2023. It was the affordable housing target for County Monaghan where I am from. The target was precisely zero affordable houses and that is exactly what the Government provided.

It is interesting that when I ask the Minister by way of parliamentary question how in God's name entire counties and swathes of the State can be excluded from the affordable housing scheme, he tells me that Monaghan County Council does not have an affordable housing delivery target as the assessed level of affordably constrained need is not high. What about that? The Government's position is essentially that houses are not yet unaffordable enough to provide affordable housing. What does this mean in reality for the family I spoke to last night, a working couple who are living in rented accommodation with notice to quit and who are paying exorbitant rents? Their rent has increased every year. As a result they cannot save for a mortgage. They cannot apply for local authority housing because the Government's arbitrary means test prevents them from doing so. The Government's solution is that they will continue to rent for the rest of their lives. This is the Government's proposal for families in this situation in counties such as Monaghan.

What is required is a serious review of the social and affordable housing targets and a Government that is able to deliver them. This is what Sinn Féin is putting forward. It is that everybody can secure a home and a roof over their head. That should not be too much to ask but that is absolutely too much to expect from this incompetent Government.

I recall when I was on Kerry County Council there were some years, in and around 2017 and 2018, when one social housing unit was built and completed in the town of Tralee. In another year, there were three. Since the Government came into power all it has done is take the baton from those disastrous policies and continue with them, with overreliance on the private sector. It is no wonder there has not been an increase in social and affordable housing. The Government has missed its low targets for social housing by 11% and its cost rental and affordable purchase low targets by more than 60% last year. I believe there were three affordable houses in Kerry in the past year.

The wider housing crisis continues apace in the county. There are 39 adults accessing emergency accommodation, an increase on previous months. The latest RTB rent report shows the private rental sector spiralling out of control and average new rents in Kerry are now €1,086 and existing rents are €906. They are probably 20% more in Killarney and Tralee. I have had people in my office who experienced rent increases of up to 50%. How are regular working people who are over the threshold for social housing supposed to afford this?

House prices show no improvement. It is no wonder that people are postponing the purchase of housing and leaving in their droves for Dubai and Perth at levels not seen since the 1980s. We need a step change and Sinn Féin's affordable leasing scheme, which Deputy Ó Broin has prepared, is just one of these changes, whereby the State would pay for all land and site servicing-related costs and the purchaser would buy the home at or near the full cost of construction. With just 1,000 affordable homes delivered by the Government last year, we need a change of government and we need a new direction in housing.

The CSO residential property prices for County Laois showed a jump of 12% in a 12-month period. Wage inflation has not jumped to meet this. This is making it harder for ordinary workers to purchase their first home. Due to the spiralling prices more workers are reliant and waiting for some type of an affordable housing programme to come onstream. So far the Government has delivered only 30 affordable properties in Laois and they have not figured in County Offaly.

The people waiting for assistance from the Government will wait a long time because the Government missed its new social housing build targets by 11% last year. It also missed its cost-rental and affordable purchase targets by up to 60%. The Government is not even meeting the low targets it is setting for itself. People in their 40s, 50s and 60s are trapped in very expensive insecure private rental accommodation. Yesterday I had a couple in their 80s into me who are facing eviction because they do not have a secure tenancy. They have lived in the house for years as excellent tenants.

Generations are locked out of affordable homes. That impacts on the economy, people's health and public services. Sinn Féin is offering part of the solution through a viable working alternative for affordable homes. Because the scheme we propose means homes would be built on serviced State land, it would reduce the initial price with the development levies being waived. It would ensure permanent affordability for subsequent buyers as the homes could be sold to another buyer who qualifies under the terms of an affordable housing scheme. This is very important. I cannot see anything wrong with it and constituents I speak to cannot see anything wrong with it.

The Government's housing policy is failing people who are caught in the trap. Sinn Féin's housing policy would give people the opportunity to buy a home and, most important of all, it is designed to deliver for ordinary working families. They are the people in dire straits trapped in private rental accommodation that is insecure and they cannot get a way forward.

I appreciate this is one of the first Private Members' debates for the Minister of State in his new role but I would have been embarrassed to have to read out the speech that he read given the record of his party in government. Let us just look at the facts. Since his party has been in government, house prices have doubled, rents have doubled and the most shocking figure is that child homelessness has increased by 500% while Fine Gael has led the Government since 2011. Tonight we will have more children sleeping in emergency accommodation than at any other time since records began. The country is wealthier and more experienced and we have more vacant homes than ever before. To come in here and say the Government's plan is working when this is the human consequence of its failed housing policy is an embarrassment.

Let us look at the Minister of State's county. How many affordable homes were in his county last year? It was zero. What was the delivery of social homes as per the Government's plan? It was half of what was promised. How many vacant property refurbishment grants were drawn down a year and a half into the scheme in the county with one of the highest levels of vacancy? It was eight. What about the families with pyrite defective homes crumbling around them? They are telling the Government the scheme is not working.

What is the Minister of State's response? It is to read a script that is filled with misleading information. He probably does not even realise it is misleading because he is new in the brief. He has told us 12,000 new social homes were delivered last year. This is not true; it was 8,500, 10% below target. He told us 4,000 affordable housing solutions were delivered. I do not know what a solution is. People cannot live in a solution. One third of these were simply approvals for a shared equity loan that have not even been drawn down. It is simply not true to quote the figure, as the Taoiseach did earlier today.

The Minister of State said 1,600 cost rentals were delivered but what about cost rentals that cost €1,400 month for one-bed accommodation and €1,800 for three-bed accommodation? Is this affordable? He said 1,000 affordable purchases were delivered. He was not here earlier today when I listed the full price to the purchaser in many of these projects, which can range from €475,000 to €565,000 for a Government-funded affordable housing scheme. What planet do you people live on?

The Minister of State spoke about private homes. Last year, 8,000 homes were built to be sold on the private market. What was the number in 2019? It was 8,000. Over all of this time the number of new homes for ordinary working people to buy on the market has not increased. In fact, it has fallen as a percentage. The funniest thing the Minister of State said – funny if it was not so serious – was that the Government's targets were evidence-based. Nobody believes this. They were based on outdated CSO data that completely ignored pent-up demand. They have not been reviewed since they were introduced and there is nothing agile about them. Yes, 100,000 homes have been delivered but this is less than half of what is required.

That is not just my view but the view of many others. The Government will not spend the €5 billion of capital. It did not spend the €4 billion last year or the €4 billion the year before because of its incompetence. Here is the problem. We have people across the country who simply cannot afford to buy a home because its policies have pushed up house prices. Its affordable purchase scheme and affordable rental scheme are not working. We have proposed a credible alternative. All of the answers to the Minister's questions that he did not have the courtesy to remain in the Chamber to hear were published in 2021. Subsequently, his scheme has not worked. Something else needs to be introduced. That is why we have tabled this motion. I commend it to the House. Until we get the current parties out of government, the affordable and social housing crisis and homelessness crisis will be deepened. For the Minister of State to come into the House and say what he has said today is not only shocking but truly embarrassing. Shame on him for that.