Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will explain my approach. We are talking about 2021 because we tend to deal in five-year time horizons. It is meant to be the parliamentary cycle. It is probably part of the human condition. We can understand five-year periods. Of course we have ring-fenced the capital funding until 2021. We have to look beyond 2021. That is what we are doing at the moment. We have to approach this from basic principles. I spoke about this recently. We must always be confident that each year, a certain percentage of the total housing stock is being built by and will be owned by local authorities and housing bodies and the people in those homes will be protected as a result. That is something I want to achieve beyond 2021 so that it does not matter who is sitting in this seat. It could be Deputy Cowen or Deputy Ó Broin, depending on what happens in the future. This is an important thing to do.

We know we need to build more. That is why I announced a 30% increase in direct builds recently. That will come from existing funding. We know we need more money. That is why I am in negotiations with the Minister about securing more money. We are hoping for a positive outcome from that. We know that HAP, in a steady state, is good for some people because it suits their point in life or their choices of what they want to do. In the current circumstances where supply is so low, HAP is not working for some people. It is having a potentially detrimental effect on the market in other areas because it is making things more difficult. We know these things. That is how we know we have to build more, which is what we are doing.

We are ramping up from a very low base. Before we had our economic crisis, approximately 90,000 homes were being built each year. I do not think we needed 90,000 homes a year. What has happened since then probably speaks to that. At the same time, we did not have a proper social housing construction programme from the Government. The private and public sectors have had to ramp up from a position of almost nil. We are ramping up quickly. We are learning every week and every month. In every engagement I have, I hear new things that might help what we are trying to do. That is why we have moved away from some sort of Rebuilding Ireland redux 2.0 to a constant rolling analysis of what we can do to improve this. That is what we are doing. Rebuilding Ireland is the plan. It has made great progress in the past year. I believe we can do more. That is what we are trying to do.