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

A total of 4,500 which is less than 5%. That is my point. If we had built social housing every year for the past 20 years we would not be in the situation we have today. Thankfully that has changed. We had a five-year plan which leads into our 20 year plan, Project Ireland 2040, to put social housing back where it should be. I ask everybody else commit to that. Some have but everybody else should do the same and not do what they did in the past which was to build houses, in a not very co-ordinated way, which were not necessarily for social housing.

What happened after that year? I want to focus on Deputy Malcolm Byrne, the new Member. He is right to say that sustainable jobs are very important. One of the first parts of Rebuilding Ireland involves having a sustainable construction sector so that people who go to college, who take on apprenticeships and develop their skills in the construction sector know they will have a safe job for a long time, not boom and bust, but that there will be a sustainable construction sector that will reward their efforts in training and education. Their teams will be rebuilt and others who go into the business of building housing will know that it is a safe sector. That is what we are trying to do. A sustainable housing construction sector will deliver in or around 30,000 houses every year for the next 20 years. It will not be a case of 50,000 one year, none the next year, 90,000 versus 10,000, but a steady supply. We are nearly at that point. We have come up to it steadily in the past three years to get to that level. This year it will be over 24,000, next year over 26,000. I will not take lectures from Fianna Fáil Deputies telling me that my party is not concerned about housing or social housing because it is not true. They need to check all the facts and figures because we act in a sustainable logical way that will add up.

I have listened to Deputy McGuinness and many of his colleagues for a long time telling me that tens of thousands of people will be evicted from their homes. That is scaremongering and it has not happened because we do not let it happen. We have a lot of schemes to work with people who are in trouble and may lose their houses through the banks. Our core system has protected the family home in most cases. Yes there are some whose cases are completely unsustainable for whatever reasons and eventually this changes. In the majority of cases, however, we have worked with people and kept them in their family homes. It is repeatedly said here, and I have been listening to it for years, that there will be tens of thousands evicted a year. That has not happened and it will not happen because we do not let it happen. Thankfully we have designed many schemes, for example, the mortgage to rent scheme is a great scheme. When a mortgage is unsustainable we can step in on behalf of the State and buy the house and rent it back to the family, with the option to buy it back. There are plenty of solutions. People should engage with us. Deputy McGuinness mentioned one or two cases where it sounded as if there was not enough intervention. I will check them out with him.

He claimed that my party brought in vulture funds. He should look at the history books. When we came into government we were handed a construction crisis, with 3,000 unfinished estates, 300,000 people out of work and 16% unemployment. That is what was handed to us. That is what led to funds coming into this country to buy up properties.

See this speech in context