Ms Susanne Rogers:

I might take that question as somebody from the Belmullet diaspora. My mother is from Eachléim. Like that, all her family are gone. Everybody left because there were no jobs; there was nothing there. When I think of urban and rural, that is where my mind goes immediately. This is a real problem. The Parliamentary Budget Office has provided figures showing a 90% hike in rent, a 75% hike in housing and a 27% hike in wages. That is a statistic we can all stand over.

We are talking about this housing crisis as if it is a recent thing. For a certain section of Irish society, there has always been a housing crisis. Professor Padraic Kenna wrote a paper in 2022 in which he looked at 100 years of Irish housing. When a social housing need assessment was done in 1919 - I wrote it down because it is such a stark fact - it found that there were 61,648 households in need of social housing. Some 100 years later, in 2020, the figure was practically the same figure, with 61,880 households having a social housing need. We would argue that this does not even reflect the real need but we have had long enough to deal with this. We are talking about constraints on building, constraints on this and constraints on that. I am at a loss to understand this. If we do not start somewhere, we are going to be having the same conversation in 2032, in 2052 and in 2100. We have record homelessness. Every single month's figure is breaking a homelessness record. It is shocking. Many children - 3,800 at the last count - are spending years in homeless accommodation. We do not even know where the damage that is doing is going to end up. The health issue will never be fixed unless housing is fixed.

The mortgage interest relief measure makes no sense whatsoever. We already have a mortgage arrears resolution process and a code of conduct on mortgage arrears. This new measure is something you will be able to access regardless of your capacity to pay your mortgage, but if you are in mortgage arrears you might not be able to access it. It make no sense. I believe the Department of Finance has done its own review on the help-to-buy scheme and has found it is not doing what it is supposed to do. On the landlord credit, again I do not understand how it will bring anything to the market. We have to question the idea of an exodus from the rental market, given that at a committee meeting the Residential Tenancies Board and the Central Statistics Office provided two very different sets of figures on that issue. It needs to be looked at. If there is an exodus from the rental market, one can think about it in this way: we are both of a similar age and we were told 20 years ago to buy a second house for our pensions.

That was the thing. Everybody went out and bought a second house. People who bought a house then are almost at retirement age now and their houses are back in equity. If landlords are exiting the system, this was always meant to happen once the mortgages were paid. I do not necessarily know then if this is a squeeze. How can landlords be exiting the system while rents have gone up 75% at the same time? I do not understand this conversation. These are two opposed things happening at the same time.

As far as we are concerned, there needs to be increased levels of social housing. Our current level stands at 9%, but this needs to be near 20%. Regarding the 90,000 houses to be built over the lifespan of the House for All policy, this total needs to be up nearer to 250,000 units to really make a dent in where we are now. We have had such a large influx of people into the country as well and this is also not going to end anytime soon either. We will have more and more people coming here because this is a safe, secure and stable country where people's children can be educated. There are opportunities here and people are going to come here. This is a real story of success and we need to be able to factor in this context as well. We are not, though. We are not counting the demographic changes occurring in the overall perspective.