Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I work closely with the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, every single day. He works harder than anyone in this House to address and tackle the housing crisis. That is the truth. He has secured an extra €11 billion for housing in the national development plan out to 2030. In 2016 the housing capital budget was €435 million. In 2020 it was €1.4 billion. Next year it will be €2.3 billion, added to by the Land Development Agency, and the work of the Housing Finance Agency. In 2016, 604 social houses were built in this country. The last Government increased investment and increased the number of homes that were being built. Last year there were more than 5,200 new direct build homes, in terms of social housing. When we add acquisitions and leases, more than 9,200 homes were added to the public housing stock despite Covid 19. The Minister, Deputy O'Brien, has delivered a range of new affordable housing through measures that have been put in place, such as, a new affordable housing fund; a new affordable housing grant of €150,000 per unit for cost rental units; the extension of the help-to-buy scheme by the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe; the Land Development Agency has now been put on a statutory footing; and we have a first-home shared equity scheme up and running. If they were to tell the truth, Opposition parties simply do not believe in home ownership. They have come up with affordable housing schemes where the applicants would never actually own the house. We have a rapidly growing population in Ireland. Despite all of the Opposition's attempts to portray Ireland as some kind of a failed State, why is it that people from all over the world want to come to our country to live, to build their lives and to build their careers? Since 2015, Ireland has had net inward migration every single year, long before the war in Ukraine and long before the international protection crisis. This year we will have net inward migration of more than 61,000 people. Ireland's population is up by more than half a million people since 2011. This underlines the scale of the challenge we face. The irony in your motion is-----

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