Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank all our guests for being with us. It often confuses me when I am at this committee because I feel I am at the Oireachtas housing committee, as they have covered much territory together.

On the opening statement, the Comptroller and Auditor General's 2019 annual report referenced the measurement of performance for Exchequer spending on social housing. It is interesting that we are in a fundamentally different place as regards the Government, public spending, policy instruments and Department activity than we were when the 2019 report was written. It is a Government line but it is the truth: we are building more public homes than we ever have. Those public homes are available to more people because we have increased the income limits and we also have cost rental and affordable purchase, which just did not exist a year and ten months ago. In fact, that is not true. Affordable purchase did exist ten years ago but was abolished by the two previous governments, which failed to reintroduce it. I do not accept a narrative that nothing has changed because the facts do not stand up to that. That is not to say we are making the progress I want us to make. I will return to that in a moment.

I will touch on the point Deputy Verona Murphy made around the issue of viability. It is a strange word that hides the fact that essentially because of the planning framework we have adopted, particularly for homes in the cities, structurally, it will almost be impossible for for-profit homes to ever be built again in places such as Dublin city. That is because, as a society, we have decided that apartments are one of the ways we can tackle commuting times and issues of density and so on in the city-----