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

I thank the Children's Rights Alliance for the work they do. We do not always see eye to eye but we have had very good engagement with them as a Government down the years. I am aware of its Report Card 2023, which was issued today or yesterday. To be fair to the alliance, in the round it gave the Government two As, five Bs, four Cs, four Ds and one E. We did not get two As last year and it is worth noting that the alliance has given the Government two As - one for enacting the Harassment and Harmful Communications and Related Offences Bill, which protects children from some of the things that happen online, and the second for the enactment of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill, and the establishment of the Online Safety Commissioner by the Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin. There are five Bs in other areas and I will not go into the detail of that. People can read the report for themselves. On the issue of homelessness, the Government got a B in one category and a D-minus in the other. The B is for the development of our national youth homelessness strategy. The D-minus, which is up from an E last year but still bad, is due to a reduction in the number of homeless families. That is because, and I acknowledge this, the number of homeless families has not come down and, indeed, has increased slightly in recent months. That is not at all acceptable or desirable from the part of Government.

In terms of what the Government is doing, I can think of five things we are doing to help people who are facing high rents. We acknowledge that people are facing very high rents particularly in our cities, but not just in our cities. The first is the rent tax credit. More than 170,000 people have claimed this. It is €500 per renter, €1,000 for a couple and €1,500 for three people renting a house in a house share. It is something we can build on in future budgets if the public finances allow. The second is the cost-rental housing, which is now a reality. It started under the last Government and became a reality under this Government and we need to scale it up. I met the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, only yesterday to talk about the ways that we can scale it up. The third is the building of social housing. There were probably more social homes built last year than any year since 1975. Not in my lifetime or perhaps in the Deputy's has there been a Government more committed to building new social housing than this.

The Deputy mentioned daft.ieearlier. On rent pressure zones, a report from daft.iepointed out shows that for existing renters, who are the vast majority of renters and who already have a tenancy, rents rose by 3.6% last year. There is also HAP, and making it available to 16,000 more families and people, by making the changes that we made. I acknowledge there is more to do in this area and we are certainly giving consideration as to what else we can do to help people, particularly by scaling up social housing and the cost-rental housing in the period ahead. The Government had not made a decision on the extension of the eviction ban. We will have to make a decision on that in the next two weeks and we said that we would. As the Deputy knows, there are pros and cons in doing so. It is not a straightforward decision.

There is a way the Deputy can help. We all accept that we cannot solve this housing crisis without more supply and we all accept that it is about more than supply, but we definitely cannot solve it without more supply. I have not objected to a housing development in seven years. I do not have the heart to do it anymore. Developments might not be perfect but they are better than nothing and they can help. Only in the past year between April 2021 and May 2022, the Deputy has objected to 1,315 new homes in his constituency alone. It is not right.

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