Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is its choice. I have to judge it on its choice which is to do nothing but talk.

We have had five or six years of jobs budgets which are very important. Deputy Micheál Martin was the first to claim, as did others, that the Action Plan for Jobs had nothing to do with job creation, yet when we produced the action plan and said we would create 100,000 jobs, everyone laughed and said we could not do it. When the target was achieved and more than 200,000 jobs were created, the mantra was that these were not real jobs. That has proved untrue because they are real jobs. People are back working and earning.

We acknowledge that people are still finding it difficult. They are back at work but they have bills to pay and are trying to catch up on their mortgages and debts, while raising families. We know that is difficult. Our budgets reflect that, trying to make life a little easier budget on budget, using the tax and social welfare systems to make it easier for them to manage and pay the bills. We know that people cannot get back to where they were overnight. They have work and hope but it takes time to rebuild their finances and get on top of things like that. We are trying to acknowledge that with the tax system and make changes every year with the income tax bands, the universal social charge, USC, changes and so on, to make it a bit easier, to help to make work pay. We know it costs money to provide accommodation and raise a family. We make changes in services, childcare, education, colleges and so on.

We are delivering housing. We are the first to acknowledge that it is not enough to solve the problem this week or next week. However, the housing problem cannot be fixed by drawing pictures of houses. They have to be built. We have to go out and find them. Fianna Fáil delivered 3,000 ghost estates. That was the first issue we had to handle when we came into government. Now we have a plan and I challenge anybody to track and watch that plan. That is factual. It is not spin from me or from the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Murphy. We show the Opposition the figures for what is happening monthly. An additional 7,000 social houses, paid for by the taxpayer, came into the system in 2017, the first year of a five-year plan. This year, 8,000 new social houses, paid for by the taxpayer, will be delivered. I can bring the Deputies opposite to each site and show them the houses.

Next year, using yesterday's budget allocation and the €2.4 billion expenditure of taxpayers' money that will be spent through Departments, local authorities and non-governmental organisations, NGOs, 10,000 social houses will be delivered. Nobody else is doing that. Others talk about it and aspire to it but we do it. We are delivering it because that is our job and we recognise that housing is priority number one. In this budget, which is a housing budget among many other things, we are committed and can say we know that 5,000 adults and their children who do not have a house today will be in a house next year because that is what the plan delivers. More than 7,000 adults left homelessness in the past 18 months through our budgetary decisions and choices. We will be judged on that. It is factual, not made up and not spin. It is there to be seen. We acknowledge that there are thousands of people who do not have a house tonight. Nobody wants children or families raised in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. We will invest in hubs to make it a bit easier but we want to deliver houses and we will deliver social, private and affordable houses and that is what we are doing in government. This budget aims to continue that good work.

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