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

With the greatest respect to the Deputy, it is the ideology of everybody in this House that people who work hard, with a decent average or lower than average income, should be able to buy their own home. It is the case that in this country, 65% to 70% of people own their own home. That was not achieved by the Social Democrats; that has been a feature of long-standing policy by Governments led by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We must ensure that can be a reality for people now in their 20s and 30s, which very clearly it is not.

What is ideologically extreme is the view from some, including, as I understand it, the Social Democrats, that we should have outright bans on some forms of housing and housing investment. That would be a mistake as there would be less housing as a consequence of that. When ideology is put over practicality, we end up with those kinds of results. If that is the policy of the Deputy's party, it is wrong. I nonetheless agree with the Deputy that the objective of all parties in this House should be to make home ownership a reality for people. It should be a reality for people in their 20s and 30s, as it has been for generations that came before.

The responsibility for dealing with the housing crisis lies with the Government now. It does not matter about the past as Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party, now in government together, must work to solve this crisis. In areas like homelessness, we are making good progress and although the number of people in homelessness is still too high, it has been falling for some time now. That is largely down to the Housing First policy initiated by the former Minister with responsibility for housing, Deputy Coveney, and brought through by former Deputy and Minister, Eoghan Murphy, during his time in that ministerial office.

We have seen a substantial increase in the volume of social housing built in recent years in Ireland. There were as few as 600 units built in 2016 and there were up to 6,000 units built in 2019. The rate of building has been hit by the impact of the pandemic but we are heading to the target of providing 12,000 social houses per year. A large proportion of housing now being built in Ireland every year is being built by the State. I do not remember the last time such a percentage of housing being built was social housing. It often goes without comment that so much of the housing now being built in Ireland is social housing. It may be as much as half and the Deputy refuses to acknowledge that.

Investment funds have an appropriate role, which is to finance developments that might not otherwise happen, therefore providing supply that would be lost otherwise. There are people such as developers and construction companies trying to build homes who find it hard to get finance to build development, particularly high-density and apartment developments, and that is where investment funds may have a role to play. We all agree that the cases in Maynooth and Hollystown exemplify the wrong approach, where funds bought most of a substantially complete estate, making it impossible for first-time buyers, upgraders, the local authority or approved housing bodies to do so. That is what we are seeking to change.

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