Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Fianna Fáil is committed to facilitating and enabling home ownership. A strong affordability scheme is vital to securing that. Recent stories about first-time buyers struggling to access credit from banks highlight the need for greater State supports. Fianna Fáil supports the Central Bank rules and its independence. However, we need greater involvement from the Government in helping people to realise the dream of home ownership. Fianna Fáil will launch a new first-time buyers special savings incentive account, SSIA, style scheme to support savers in getting together a deposit to meet Central Bank rules. We will ramp up the supply of affordable housing units after Fine Gael scrapped the scheme in 2012. We will introduce a rent freeze to limit costs for renters. We will launch a shared ownership scheme to help buyers get on the ladder. We will reform the mortgage market and its rip-off interest rates that are above EU levels.

Affordable housing was a key aim of Fianna Fáil in budget 2019. We actively support home ownership and aim to launch an ambitious new scheme that will provide subsidised homes on State-owned land throughout the country. We want a new €100 million per annum affordable housing fund. The investment will construct at least 6,000 homes by 2021. It quadruples, from €25 million, the originally allocated money per year. We will resolve the ongoing mortgage arrears crisis by ending the banks' veto and holding them to account on behalf of their customers.

Some Deputies in this House try to link us to the Fine Gael housing policy and to say that when Fianna Fáil was in government, things were the same. The statistics show otherwise and it is clearly the case that Fianna Fáil Governments in the past succeeded in building houses, even though many Deputies in this House tried to show that that is not the case. Comparing the period from 2002 to 2008 with 2011 to 2017, Fianna Fáil built five times as much local authority housing as Fine Gael.

It also outperformed Fine Gael in affordable housing by a ratio of 2:1. The total number of social houses built by local authorities under Fianna Fáil-led Governments in that period was 33,705, while under Fine Gael it was 7,421. These figures prove that a Fianna Fáil-led Government will build houses, and we look forward to the opportunity to do so.

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