Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Let us stick to the facts. The Minister should stop talking about 10,000 social housing homes being delivered this year. That is not true. He should stop talking about 20,000 or 27,000 social housing homes being delivered. The Government's plan is to build 6,545 new social housing homes. He cannot seriously claim that more than 2,000 homes leased from private developers amount to social housing homes. In what world is that social housing? There is no grand conspiracy but, instead, there is a deliberate manipulation of the definition of "social housing" to pretend the Government is planning to do a lot more than it is. That gives the Government much higher targets than the reality of its targets. It also distracts from the fact that the Government is nowhere near its targets. The Government's ideology means it is in favour of incentivising landlords and developers to come into the market. It simply refuses to invest in public housing to deal with the housing crisis. The landlords and the developers the Government represents are getting super rich as a consequence of that. The idea we have ideology and the Government has no ideology is utter nonsense.

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