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

We are acting on this. Just in the past few weeks, we have introduced rent tax credits at €500 per renter, €1,000 for a couple, three people sharing getting €1,500 and four people sharing getting €2,000. That is going to help people in a meaningful way with their rent costs. That is something I believe we can build on in future budgets if the public finances allow. We are also making a reality of cost-rental housing. This is something talked about for a very long time and it is now a real option for people to be able to rent securely and pay a rent that is much lower than the market rent. We need to scale that up big time over the years ahead. We are doing exactly that using the Land Development Agency, LDA, in particular, and we have the rent pressure zones. Most tenants in Ireland are covered by rent pressure zones now. These are sitting tenants and as we know from the daft.iereport, rents rose for sitting tenants by approximately 3.8% last year which is very different from what is the case for new-to-market properties. The only way we can deal with the very high rents for new-to-market properties is by increasing supply, and that means standing up to politicians and parties who oppose new developments, often opposing them specifically because they are for rent-----

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