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

It is an emergency. I am on record as having said that as far back as January or February of this year, if not long before that. Of course it is an emergency. If it was not an emergency, we would not be spending €60 million a year to put people up in emergency accommodation, we would not have brought in rent caps in urban areas and we would not have brought about fast-track planning. They were all emergency measures brought in because this is an emergency. Calling it an emergency does not actually solve the problem. What solves the problem is building houses and new homes and apartments that people can live in. That is where there is delivery. If we look at the facts, nearly 20,000 new homes and apartments will be built this year. That is up from 15,000 last year and 10,000 the year before. Before Christmas, 20,000 new homes will have been built this year and 50,000 or 60,000 people will have been given the keys to a new house. They can then live in those homes and free up accommodation for others. That is real delivery. The truth is that there are rate-limiting factors. There is only so much concrete in the country and only so many serviced sites and construction workers. There also has to be a planning process. We are ramping things up as quickly as we can. Again, to look at the numbers, when we started on this programme, less than 10,000 homes were being built. We then had 15,000 last year and we will have about 20,000 this year and 25,000 next year.

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