Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. Deputy Wallace spoke once again about spin over substance. If he wants substance, here it is. There were 14,000 new homes built last year, which is 50% more than the year before. This year 20,000 new homes will be built. That is a significant number of new homes being built in this country for people and families to live in. These are real homes with front doors, brick walls, windows and gardens. It is not spin. They are there. There is some evidence that house prices are starting to level off. Rent increases have gone from double digit increases to 1% or 1.1% in the last two quarters. In the last year 5,000 families were taken out of homelessness. Rough sleeping is also down by 40%. These are real numbers and there are real facts and real people behind all of those, and real substance. I am not pretending for a second that there is not much more that needs to be done or that we have got on top of this issue. I am not claiming that but I am giving real factual examples of the progress that has been made.

It is not the view of this Government that the market will fix it. That is a charge made against us by our opponents but it is not the case. If we believe that the market on its own could fix the problems in our housing sector we would not be investing in 110,000 new public homes. That is what is there. It is in Rebuilding Ireland and Project Ireland 2040. It is a substantial public housing building programme with 110,000 public homes to be built over the next ten years. Last year 7,000 houses were already added to the stock and that will rise to 10,000 in the years ahead. That is where we think it needs to be, at about 10,000 new homes being built every year by the public sector. If we believed the charges of Deputy Wallace, that the private sector had all of the solutions, we certainly would not be implementing a policy like that. We also have the Land Development Agency which is designed to operate like a semi-State such as An Post, the ESB or Telecom Éireann in the past. It has a commercial mandate but its primary principle is not to make a profit. It is to deliver necessary infrastructure and services for people and to break even and that is the way it is going to work. It will be a public developer developing publically owned lands for a mix of housing - social, affordable and private housing for people to buy.

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