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

I thank the Deputy. We agree on one point, which is that we need more supply. We need more homes and social housing, and we need more homes that are affordable for people to buy. It is encouraging to see that every week, 700 mortgages are issued to first-time buyers, the highest number since the Celtic tiger period. Perhaps 400 or 500 couples and individuals are now buying their first homes every week. That is the highest number since the Celtic tiger period and that is encouraging. It is difficult for the Deputy to acknowledge that any progress is ever being made but the facts say otherwise. We are acting to bring down rents and increase social housing, as we have been doing for many years. We will do more this year and more again the following year. We are scaling up cost rental as fast as we can because a big part of the future will be providing that option for people who do not qualify for social housing but may struggle to buy or afford to rent.

When the Deputy uses figures and statistics around affordable housing, he is only talking about one intervention by which we make housing more affordable for people. He is not counting the help-to-buy scheme, which his party wants to take away. That would mean considerable numbers of young people having to save for many more years just to get a deposit before they can even bid on a house, never mind what price the house may be. Programmes such as the first home scheme bridge the gap between the mortgage people are approved for and the cost of buying the home. There are also local authority home loans. All those things make housing more affordable for people. What one has to do, if one is being genuine about the situation, is to look at all the people who have got some form of help from the Government to buy their first homes in the past couple of years. There are tens of thousands of such people.

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