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

Protest is part of democracy. Provided the protest is lawful and peaceful then it is welcome. I have no objection to anyone taking part in protests to highlight important issues that affect society, because they highlight issues and spur us on to do more to deal with them. That is my view on that. Any protest that is peaceful and lawful should be welcomed in a democracy, and I do.

What the Deputy tried to do was a classic fallacy. If I did it, no doubt people would call it spin, but it is not spin. It is a fallacy. It is an attempt to put words in other people's mouths, to finish their sentences or to do what they often do, namely, to tell us what we think, as if they knew. It is just classic fallacy.

As Deputy Bríd Smith rightly pointed out, what I was describing was her politics, which is to divide people. We do not want to do that. We want to create communities. We want integrated housing and we want housing for everyone in society. People who are on housing lists need social housing and people who want to buy their own homes should be able to do so. The average person buying his or her own home in Ireland is in his or her mid-30s, which should not be the case. People should be in their 20s, as was the case in the past. I lead a Government that believes in home ownership and we want to make sure that more and more people can buy their own homes, and in particular that people in their 20s can afford to do so again. That is the reason we are doing what we are doing.

As I said earlier, we have put in place the biggest social housing programme in decades. More than 100,000 social houses are to be provided over the next ten years. This year alone we will increase the social housing stock by 8,000. People will move into those homes this year with their families. We are building more homes for people to purchase. A total of 20,000 new houses and apartments will be built in Ireland this year, up from 15,000 in 2017 and 10,000 in 2016. We will build more new houses and apartments in Ireland this year than any year in the past ten years, and we intend to build even more thereafter. The solution is to build homes of all types because everyone in society deserves to have a roof over their head, and that is what we want to achieve.

The ideologues and the people who are wedded to particular political philosophies are not us. We are the ones who want to build new homes as quickly as possible, and we will do so by any mechanism we can find.

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