Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

-----and the continued long leasing of housing, which is a very expensive way of delivering housing, without there being an asset at the end, it has turned social housing into an attractive and profitable product.

The €4 billion shrinks to nearly €2 billion when we make allowances for all of this. The direct builds of local authorities are in many cases turnkeys rather than direct builds and are not an addition to housing completion numbers.

Last week's ESRI report is very sobering. The report states that one in three people aged between 35 and 44 years will not own a home by retirement age. The new research suggests that a future cohort of retirees will likely have substantially lower rates of homeownership than current retirees, with only 65% of those currently aged 35 to 44 years estimated to become homeowners by retirement age. It gets worse. We are told that it is even more stark for the age cohort between 25 and 34 years, of which one in two households are likely to become homeowners by retirement age. The report finds that such drastic changes in homeownership patterns could raise the proportion of people aged 65 years and over in income poverty due to housing costs from the current rate of 14% to 31%. That is some legacy and it is being created as we speak as a result of deliberate housing policies that make housing completely unaffordable. It is not just an issue of delivery. There is an affordability crisis at the heart of the housing crisis.

We are spending approximately €22 billion on our health service, yet it is in perpetual crisis. One quarter of the population, some 1.3 million people, are now on waiting lists for health services. That is a truly shocking figure. It has become much more difficult to retain our excellent healthcare workers because the system also fails them. There has been a rush to the door and it hardly fills one with confidence that people like Professor Tom Keane and Ms Laura McGahey left the health service last year partly because they did not believe there was a real commitment to reform through Sláintecare. We have watched senior officials head to the door in recent weeks and months and it does not fill one with confidence that the Department of Health is in control or can reform the healthcare system to the extent required to tackle that problem.

This is supposed to be a cohesive Government and it cannot even agree climate targets. The Green Party must ask itself what the key issue is in this Government, if it is not about delivering sectoral climate targets.

The tone of any parliament is always set by government, but the change in tone of this Parliament was like the flicking of a light switch when this Government took up office as opposed to the tone of a minority government when the Dáil was in control of the agenda and there was a more collegiate approach.

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