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

I thank the Deputy. There are lots of ways in which the Government is helping people to buy their own homes. The help-to-buy scheme helps people to get a deposit by getting some of their taxes back. Some 10,000 people have availed of that scheme, which has helped them to get a deposit to buy a new home. The Rebuilding Ireland home loan has helped thousands of people to get mortgages. In addition, there are all of the actions being taken by the Government to increase housing supply. Of the 18,000 new homes built last year, one in four was social housing built by local authorities or affordable housing bodies. It is probably the first time in a long time that one in four homes built here was public housing. We will continue and intensify that in the years ahead.

The social housing income limit is under review. We acknowledge that it needs to be reviewed and increased because house prices have increased more rapidly than incomes. That work is currently being done.

I wish to come back to something the Deputy said earlier, which was not true. On the figures he used relating to poverty, what the Deputy said was very misleading. He included people who are in poverty and added to that the number of people who are at risk of poverty. Being at risk of poverty is not the same as being in poverty, which means having a low income and, as a result, suffering forms of deprivation. That is terrible and we need to reduce that and work on it every year, as every Government does. Being at risk of poverty is a relative measure related to earning 60% less than the median income. The Deputy is a bright guy who understands facts and numbers. There will always be hundreds of thousands of people who earn less than 60% of the median income. What he said, therefore, is not true. He combined the figure for those who are at risk of poverty with the figure for those in poverty and said it was poverty. That was misleading and the Deputy should not do that type of thing.

Figures from the Central Statistics Office, which nobody disputes, show that poverty rose during the recession and financial crisis but has been falling for five years. Having peaked at 12.8% in 2013, it fell to 12.7% in 2014, 11.5% in 2015, 10.9% in 2016 and 8.8% in 2017. While we do not have the 2018 figures, we anticipate that the rate has fallen again. What we see are five years of falling levels of deprivation and poverty. The questions the Deputy should have asked me are what policies the Government has brought in to make this possible and how have we succeeded in bringing down poverty levels and deprivation for the past five years. The answers are simple. The first is to do with employment. A person in employment has a 95% to 97.5% chance of not experiencing poverty. We and the Irish people have worked so hard to turn the economy around to make sure we are approaching full employment. We have increased wages. The minimum wage has increased by nearly 25% since 2011 or 2012. Wages are now going up across the economy. We have increased welfare payments of all forms for the last three budgets in a row, including weekly payments and targeted payments such as those for children in low income families and the fuel allowance. We are also bringing in subsidised and affordable childcare. We are extending school meals programmes and free GP care to more and more children. The question the Deputy should have asked is how we managed to reduce poverty every year for the past four years. That is the answer to the Deputy's question.

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