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

Rebuilding Ireland contains a couple of commitments for the delivery of new homes. One of the key commitments is that 25,000 new homes for people to live in will be delivered in 2019. I will set out where I think we are at by going through the component parts of that cohort of 25,000 new homes. In 2018, there was a 25% increase on 2017. We have to work on projections. This is not an exact science. We are not building these homes ourselves. We change laws or regulations to allow these homes to be built separately from the homes we are building directly ourselves. More than 6,000 homes will be delivered through our own programmes. If we estimate that last year's level of activity will increase by between 15% and 25% this year, we can calculate that between 20,700 and 22,500 new homes will be built this year. I will explain what will support that. We had 22,000 commencements in 2018. In the first quarter of this year, we had 5,758 commencements, which represented an increase of 31% on the figure for the first quarter of last year. That is the range we are looking at. I think we can assume that between 2,000 and 2,500 more homes will come out of long-term vacancy in 2019. In the first quarter of this year, 559 homes came out of long-term vacancy. In addition, we will see between 300 and 500 homes coming on stream from unfinished housing estates. Anyone who has had the problem of unfinished housing estates in their constituency will know that, in many of these cases, nothing was built at all. A site may have been opened without even the floor plates being put down. That is a full build that has to happen. We think the number will be between 300 and 500. Some 182 homes were completed on that side of the ledger in the first quarter of this year. When I step back from all of that and look at it, I am confident that we will see 25,000 new homes becoming available for use this year. Those projections are confirmed by the figures we saw last year and in the first quarter of this year.