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

We have to make housing affordable. That is agreed and it is achieved by doing. There is a variety of different investments we have to make. We need to make significant investment in social housing at volume and at scale. That involves large numbers and huge amounts of money. The constraints in that regard are often not necessarily about the financing but getting the building workers with the training and skills, the blocklayers and so on. We need to avoid the costs going up so much that it is expensive for everyone to build. We need to do that so that we can build more. It is about what we agreed the other night in terms of changing the Part V rules to say it is not just 10% social housing but we also want affordable purchase and cost rental. That is significant. We need the affordable purchase provision and the likes of the serviced sites fund to help bring down the cost, working with the local authorities. The local authorities have a central role and we need to work with them on that.

The coming months will be critical because the strategy and the plan have to be changed. We need to change tack and do better. The funding has to go in that direction and we will use our influence in government in that regard. It is difficult because there are loads of funding requirements. We are going to have to fund health, including Sláintecare, education, climate and housing. It is a challenge to get the balance right but we will fund affordable purchase housing as well as social housing. I believe cost rental is critical because it fundamentally changes things. The two tiers we have in Irish housing are around whether it is social or private. The brilliant thing about cost rental is that it is between the two. It is in the market but it is public. I keep coming back to the Land Development Agency and the use of public land because I believe that is the key to help to unlock supply at scale. I am talking about real ambition. We are looking to influence, within the Government and with a cross-party approach, access to public lands.

Critical to this, and I have to mention it at every stage because it is crucial it is recognised, is that housing and public transport go together. To answer the Deputy's question about my vision for Dublin city, it is that we have a 15-minute city. It will be an accessible city with everything close by and high-quality cycling and walking facilities as well as public transport infrastructure. That needs to be funded. There is a huge funding requirement if we are to build the likes of the metro, BusConnects and DART+ for Cork, Galway and Limerick as well as Dublin. We need balanced regional development to make this work. It has to include our other cities. In the development of town centres, village centres and cities we need to go for compact development. Housing, transport and local environment are key.

We have a real role to offer and provide in terms of getting access to the land and getting an intervention on the sorts of measures I have mentioned. There will also be private developments and there will be build-to-rent provision. The €120 billion we need to spend on housing in the next ten years will not all be from the Government. If it were, we would not have the funding for transport, health and education.

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