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

Let us move on to the issue at hand. We are experiencing a very deep housing crisis in this State and we have done so now for quite some time. It affects lots of people in lots of different ways, whether it is people who are struggling to pay the rent, people who cannot find their first home to buy or people who have been living at home too long. I know this and I get it. I deal with this every day in my constituency service in trying to help people, as I am sure the Deputy does.

The Deputy wants to do something very simplistic. He wants to just blame it all on the Government. He makes out, for example, that the housing crisis has somehow been created by the Government or Government policy. This is far too simplistic. A large number of countries, unfortunately, are facing housing crises now, including in Northern Ireland. This happens for many different reasons. It is happening in Ireland because we have had a dramatic increase in population, we have smaller house sizes and we had a prolonged period, about seven years, during which almost no new homes were built in this State. This followed a financial crash when the Government was broke, the banks were bust and the construction industry was destroyed. Two thirds of construction workers had to leave the country. This is why we have a huge deficit of housing that we have this State.

This Government, and the one before it and the one before that, has done everything possible to turn this around. We are now, at long last, seeing some real progress. I know it is not enough but it is real progress and it is something I think the Deputy should acknowledge. Some 30,000 new homes were built last year, more than in any year in more than a decade. A record level of social housing is being built now, more than we have seen since the 1970s. The Deputy may not know this, but the proportion of people living in social housing is now higher than it was ten years ago. This is both in percentage terms and raw numbers.

We are also seeing a big increase in the number of first-time buyers and this is very encouraging. Each week, 700 people are getting mortgage approval and perhaps 400 to 500 people each week buying their first homes. We have not seen this happening in the best part of 20 years.

Instead of the Deputy misrepresenting and misquoting me, and trying to put words into my mouth and accusing me of blaming people I have never blamed for anything, he should at least acknowledge some of the progress that has been made in the past couple of years.

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