Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not accept that assessment, which will be no surprise to the Deputy. He approaches the housing crisis from an ideological perspective. He believes no one should make any profit from building a house anywhere as far as I can see. He believes that everybody should essentially be provided with a home by the State and that the taxpayer should pay for it all. Our position is that people who cannot afford to buy their own homes need to be supported by the State through affordable housing, affordable rental, supported rental or social housing.

Our economy is recovering from a deep recession that was caused by the collapse of a property market and a banking system. It has taken time to build capacity again in local authorities and in banking systems in terms of builders and developers being able to produce the number of homes that are needed across all sectors. We are now seeing dramatic year-on-year increases in the delivery of social housing. Working with some of the parties opposite, we will see a new affordable housing scheme delivering affordable houses in the next two to three years. We assigned money specifically for that in the previous budget. We are seeing private homes being built. We are seeing more first-time buyers purchasing houses than we have seen for a decade. The Rebuilding Ireland loan scheme the Deputy mentioned is a victim of its own success because we set €200 million aside for it. Clearly that money has now been fully used up and we need to find a way of financing that successful scheme into the future. The Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform are figuring out a way to do that.

I am not suggesting that we do not have a major housing challenge to solve. Far too many people and far too many families are homeless. The number of families who are homeless has levelled off and we now need to ensure that number reduces dramatically over time. It is not correct to suggest that the delivery of homes is not moving in the correct direction. There were more than 18,000 new homes last year with 8,000 extra social houses last year. We need to get that figure over 10,000 and we need to increase total house building to more than 25,000, and we will. However, these things do not happen overnight and they certainly do not happen if the State takes on the burden of doing everything itself.

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