Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The Minister of State has just treated us to another typical exercise in self-congratulation in which he finished by telling us that the anticipated increase in house prices this year will be in the region of 7.5%. He congratulated himself on that fact even though the rate is three times that of inflation. It is a measure of how dislocated the Government is from the real problems of people trying to acquire housing that he believes that a rate of house price increase that is three times the rate of inflation is something about which we should be satisfied.

In my constituency in the greater Dublin area——

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