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

I thank the Deputy for making a very valid and prescient point. We need to build a great deal more homes. We will probably build approximately 25,000 to 28,000 houses this year. That is nowhere near enough when we think about what we need. However, by building homes, we increase emissions. We cannot build homes without using concrete, timber and steel or without roads and emissions. It is one of the trade-offs we have to accept that in order to solve the housing crisis, we will see an increase in emissions from at least the residential part of construction. There are sustainable ways we can mitigate against that, however. We can do so by bringing vacant homes back into use, which does increase emissions but not by as much, as the Deputy has pointed out. There is also the better use of our existing housing stock. That means right-sizing. We need to encourage people to right-size. In many cases, this will involve downsizing, but they will need places into which they can downsize. There are just not enough of those, particularly in our cities.

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