Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is not fair of the Taoiseach to select a very short period of time and then extrapolate over a longer period. The amount of resources and Dáil time we have allocated to housing has been very substantial. The Taoiseach needs to acknowledge that. He has acknowledged that the problem is getting worse and states he intends to give more time to dealing with it in the period ahead. The problems are obvious. Some of them were touched on, but it remains the case that there is very significant land hoarding in Ireland. As long as it is more profitable to hold or trade land than to build on it, there is going to be a problem. That remains the case. Banks, including the State-owned banks, receivers, vulture funds and private landowners are sitting on land that could be developed. In many cases, the land has been zoned and is located where services are actually available. This happens because it is more profitable to sit on the land and rely on the expectation that its value will grow. I do not know what the Government is planning to do about this using tax measures. Will they actually be implemented next year?

We have been promised a report on the cost of building housing. We still hear from many builders and developers that it is not viable to build in certain parts of the country. That remains a problem, but I have not seen any such report from the Government to tackle the cost of building housing. It seems to take local authorities forever to get schemes off the ground, even where they have been sanctioned. That obviously is an issue. There are also issues with funding. It was announced in the budget last October that a new €750 million fund would be made available for house building. That has not yet happened.

However, builders and developers are having to borrow at very expensive rates from international funds at perhaps 12% or 14%. It is pushing up the cost of housing with the result being a growing affordability gap and a structural shift in our society where fewer and fewer people into the future will be able to afford a home. This is the reality of what is happening out there. From the work I do at constituency level, and every Deputy does a lot of constituency work, I can tell the Taoiseach that it is getting worse. I have seen a very dramatic uplift in the number of housing-related queries in recent weeks. Far from being confident that the Government is getting on top of this, I think it will get worse. Nothing said by the Taoiseach or the Minister of State will give people confidence that the tide is actually turning because time and again, the Taoiseach has said it will get better and the Government is getting on top of it but the figures get worse at an accelerated pace so something is very badly wrong in the Government's approach.