Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will, if I can finish without interruption. The point I am making is that there are 1,605 first-time buyers getting mortgage approvals every single month. I made the point earlier on that they are not buying new homes. The reality is that they are buying second-hand homes. The Central Bank provided figures from last year that showed that first-time buyers only bought 756 homes. I know that. However, the Minister is now introducing an incentive for them to buy new homes. The point I am making is that if those 19,000 decide to follow the Minister's lead, the cost to the State will be €385 million. Outside the cost to the State of this, the Banking and Payments Federation are telling us is that there are 3,400 individuals getting mortgage approval every single month and 1,600 of them are first-time buyers. That blows a massive hole in the Minister's argument that the people out there do not have a capacity to get a mortgage. They do have that capacity and the number of mortgages that are being approved is in excess of the stock that is available to buy.

I will finish on this. The Minister asked me why there are not any new houses being built. The reason is because of the trend that house prices will continue to rise. Developers are waiting. Whether there is an argument of legitimacy here or not, developers are waiting for house prices to rise further in order that their profit margins increase. We have heard this from the likes of NAMA, for example, which told us that it is only now appropriate for it to start building because house prices have risen to a certain level. Developers are waiting for house prices to rise in order that it becomes profitable enough for them to start building. That is the argument I put to the Minister. Let us look at the issue from the other side of it, in terms of the cost of building a house. It is a recommendation that came from the housing committee that the Government has not acted upon. It was universally agreed by all political parties that the Minister should bring forward a report on the cost of building a house in this State. The figures out there are different. There are different figures from the housing associations, the Housing Agency, Construction Industry Federation, CIF, and all the rest.