Dáil debates

Tuesday, 9 April 2019

Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions

 

2:55 pm

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

We agree that supply is the solution. We have a rising population, increasing by about 1.5% a year - very few countries in the western world have a population increasing as fast as ours - and we also have an emerging phenomenon of smaller household sizes, so we need a great deal of extra housing every year just to stand still. We agree that supply is the solution to the underlying problem, and addressing that is what we are doing. A total of 18,000 new homes built last year. One in four of those new homes were for social housing built by local authorities or affordable housing bodies. I do not know the last time we built one in four houses for social housing but that is what was done last year. It was probably the biggest social housing programme in decades, and that needs to continue. We want to increase that to about 25,000 new homes this year. If we could ramp it up quicker, believe me, we would, but we have not been able to do that.

We considered the introduction of a national cap on rents a year or two ago and there were a number of reasons we concluded that was not a good idea. First, we do not have a national rental market. Dunmanway is very different from Cork city and Cork city is very different again from Dublin.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.