Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

As a Member for Dublin Bay South, I know exactly what the Deputy is saying about the scale and depth of this crisis. It is without doubt an issue all over the country. It is at its most acute in the centre of Dublin, however.

I can see the dilemma in my own constituency, particularly for a new younger generation. We will not leave them behind, we will not leave them out, and we will do everything in our power to make sure they have the ability, as my own and previous generations did, including those in Dublin Bay South, to be able to afford a home.

We need to look after people of all means, incomes and needs, particularly those in inner cities. The current model is broken. The market is not working and it will not fix this. There has to be a radical change and we will help steer that change from within government.

We started by increasing this year's budget by 25% up to €3.3 billion, which I believe is a quarter of the entire capital budget. We will not stop there. We will need approximately €120 billion over the next ten years. That will not all come from the State but a large part of it will.

In the remaining time of this Government, I intend and expect to put this centre stage within government, as both the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have said, and apply the exact same rigour, urgency and flexibility that has been applied to the Covid-19 crisis to both the climate and housing crises. The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021 will be able to help us on climate. We need to put housing at centre stage and we need all Departments to act.

We increased this year's capital budget, which is the key and real measure of what we can build and do. We brought in a second measure, however. I recall in the previous Dáil, we were the first Opposition party that stood up and got cross-party agreement that we needed to switch to cost-rental housing as one of the ways to address this crisis.

In this year's budget, we acted and worked with the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to say let us make it happen and start straightaway with eight projects we can start building, which are not just theoretical or abstract, and where we are calling from the sidelines, but actually start delivering. That is only the start. The reason cost rental is such a part of the solution is that it is social and public housing. Rather than leased assets that go back to the private sector, the assets stay with our own public assets, on which we can build a long-term, sustainable financing model. It takes time.

We must be honest with our younger people that they and this housing issue are the first priority. The benefit of cost rental is that it is in the market. We can use public lands. We can actually bring down the rental price. That combined with affordable housing options, including the use of the serviced sites fund so that we actually reduce the cost, will be critical, particularly for urban areas.

This is not one versus the other. We particularly need to deliver on our national planning framework, which provides for high-quality homes and housing in urban areas, where people are there for life and have security of tenure. It is not that the rental sector does not count; it does. That applies to apartment ownership as well as renting. We need a variety of different solutions.

The key measures in the coming two months are the development of a new housing for all strategy that delivers on this, within which the Affordable Housing Bill 2021 will be key. We agreed with our Government colleagues the other day at Cabinet meetings that we would further look at amendments within the Bill to give us a range of options and flexibility and the ability to really create high-quality urban living.

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