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

We might have a chat afterwards and he can let me know where it is. We can certainly ask the LDA to take a look at it.

On the rent tax credit, it does cover students who are paying rent and where parents pay on their behalf, but it does not cover unregistered landlords. The difficulty with unregistered landlords is they should be registered. They are either not registered with the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, or are not paying their own taxes, and that has to be regularised. I do not think we could have a situation where we pay the tax credit in respect of a property that is not registered. I think that for lots of reasons, we could not do that. It does apply only to people who are renting in the State. If they are renting in Derry, for example, it would be up to the Government in Northern Ireland to bring in a rent tax credit. There was a lot of time when Deputy Conway-Walsh's party could have done that, in fairness, but it did not. The same applies, obviously, to other jurisdictions too.

In respect of Deputy Cian O'Callaghan's question, I did not see those figures out today. As I understand it, the figures that suggest we built close to 30,000 new homes last year come from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, and there is no body we could say is more accurate than the Central Statistics Office when it comes to statistics. It is certainly not subject to political influence and does not spin statistics or anything like that. Where there are different numbers out there, I would tend to go with the ones from the CSO rather than from anywhere else, but the Deputy raises a legitimate question and I do not know what the discrepancy or difference is, so I will make inquiries about that.

We do not have the exact numbers for new social housing for 2022 yet, but the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, tells me it will be close to 8,000 new builds last year, which looks like it will be the highest number since 1975, and that is a very significant increase in the provision of new social housing. In most of our lifetimes, no government has built as much social housing as this one did last year, but we need to build more and we have a higher target again for this year and the year after.

As for the median age of people leaving home, I think I saw the report and, if I remember correctly, the median age now for people leaving home is 28. It was lower but it has gone up. Of course, the Government accepts responsibility for putting that right and we are doing that through the help-to-buy scheme and the first home scheme and also by increasing supply. As I have said before, just under 70% of people in Ireland own their own home, but that is not the reality for people who are in their mid-20s and mid-30s and we need to change that. At the heart of the Government's housing policy is a commitment to increasing home ownership again. We do not believe in the rent-for-life models other people believe in. We want to see home ownership increase, but for those who are renting, we want to make sure they have secure tenancies and affordable rents too.

Deputy Bacik mentioned the allegations in respect of the ESB. I only became aware of them through media reports at the weekend. I have been briefed since. I am seriously concerned about them. The ESB is a respected State company and a respected public body. I would not like to believe these things are true but they may well be true, and if they are true, it is a very serious matter. I have been briefed that the Garda is involved now, that a Garda investigation is under way and that a confidential phoneline is available for people to make reports. I encourage anybody, whether home builders, businesspeople or anybody who has information on this, to share it with the Garda because we need to get to the bottom of it very quickly.

In respect of the eviction ban, or partial eviction ban if you prefer, we will make a decision on that in the next few weeks. When we took the decision to reintroduce it, we had hoped it would see the numbers of people in emergency accommodation fall, because they did fall during the period of the pandemic restrictions. That has not happened. Numbers have continued to rise and it shows many factors are at play when it comes to homelessness.

See this speech in context