Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Again, I do not think it is fair to look at that in isolation. I would point out the enormous supports the Government is giving to young people in respect of affordable housing. More than €1.3 billion of investment will support an overall package of measures to deliver thousands of affordable houses next year by helping people buy and rent at an affordable rate, such as the first-home affordable purchase shared equity scheme that has been introduced, with €50 million allocated to that. There will be close to 1,000 cost-rental homes, most of which will be delivered by approved housing bodies, and further funding has been given by the State to enable that to happen. There is also the Land Development Agency, LDA, investment of €600 million for 2023, which will support the targeted delivery of 1,400 cost-rental and affordable purchase homes, and the €250 million for lending under the local authority home loan scheme, under which more than €471 million has been lent out in recent years. All of that is helping and the State is getting involved, not to mention the help-to-buy scheme, which has supported 35,000 buyers to date. The State is in there, supporting people in terms of affordability.

In the context of the concrete levy, the Deputy will be aware that when the Government took a decision in November 2021 in regard to a range of actions to deal with the defective blocks issue, everybody in the House wanted the most comprehensive of packages to deal with the problems caused by mica specifically. The cost of that at the time was estimated at about €2.8 billion, which the Government agreed to take on. Similarly, the pyrite interventions have since 2013 probably cost close to €1 billion and there is another €500 million or €600 million to go on that scheme. Yesterday, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage brought forward a memorandum to Government on apartment defects that outlined the scale of the issues, with up to 100,000 apartments potentially impacted. He will bring forward proposals on a scheme before the end of the year to help people remediate these units and to help the homeowners concerned. All in all, if we take the three schemes into account, we are looking at an intervention by the State of somewhere between €4 billion and €6 billion on these issues. The view was taken at the time of the mica intervention - this was signalled at the time - that some element of sustainability would have to be built into this in the form of future revenue streams to meet this enormous cost into the future. Hence, there was the idea of a defective concrete products levy. I accept the Deputy's point that not everybody in the sector engaged in this, but in the insurance industry, levies came in for many decades to deal with rogue behaviour as well. There is a challenge there for everybody in terms of meeting the needs of the homeowners.

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