Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is not fair and it does not add up. I have made housing the priority of this Government and, along with my colleagues in government, the three parties have said that the three key priorities are housing, health reform, and planning change. Look at the variety of schemes that we have introduced on housing. We have the all new Croí Cónaithe scheme. We introduced the Land Development Agency, which again the Deputy's party opposed. By any yardstick, going from 20,000 houses to 30,000 houses was a significant turning of the corner last year, albeit it is still all too low and we have to do more. This was notwithstanding Covid-19 during the first two years of Government when we had lock downs and so on. Those are the facts that one cannot just dismiss.

The popular decision would have been to keep the eviction ban going. That would be popular but it would not have been a sustainable position to adopt in terms of the supply question. We would have made it worse for people who would have faced further difficulty in getting access to housing. That was the dilemma. People are not coming into the rental market and people are leaving the rental market.

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