Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is telling that the Minister, in his five-minute contribution, spent only two minutes outlining his budget measures and three minutes attacking the Opposition. That is two minutes of more empty promises that will be unfulfilled and three minutes of deliberate misrepresentations of Sinn Féin's position. The reason, of course, is that yesterday we learned the emperor has no clothes. Despite the housing crisis getting ever worse year on year and despite the Government claiming housing and homelessness is its priority, the Minister secured nothing new of any substance to tackle the affordability crisis, the social housing crisis or the homelessness crisis.

Let us look at the facts. First, there is no change and no increase to the social and affordable housing targets announced two years ago. Despite the Government having missed its targets year on year and despite the levels of need rising, it is still stuck with targets that are too low and, even if it delivered them, would not meet demand. There is no increase in capital funding for that social and affordable housing delivery programme. The budget book makes this clear. There is €2.6 billion, the same as last year, because it has not changed the target. When we look, for example, at the very meagre increases within the overall envelope for the social housing investment programme, the affordable housing fund and the cost-rental equity loan, it is clear the Government has given up on the idea of councils and approved housing bodies delivering the volume of homes required.

The Minister talked about increasing the renter's tax credit, but there is only €250 extra. That will be swallowed up by rent increases, both inside and outside the rent pressure zones, and ultimately, it will be paid to the landlord. As for the landlord's tax credit, for which the Minister fought so hard and into which he put so much political capital, he should listen to what landlords are saying today. It will not make a whit of difference in keeping single-property landlords in the market whom the Minister's bad policies have been driving out over a number of years.

We need to look at house prices, because the only way we can tackle the affordable housing crisis is if house prices come down. The Minister is continuing not only with the disastrous help-to-buy scheme but also with the shared equity loan scheme, pushing up house prices, saddling working people with high-risk debt and making it harder and harder for them to afford a home. That is why, every time the Minister's party is in government, homeownership as a percentage of the overall housing stock falls. As it is currently doing, so will it continue.

On homelessness, the Minister has a commitment, which I support, to ending long-term homelessness and the need to sleep rough by 2030, yet there is no plan to demonstrate how year on year we will see that decrease. In fact, I thought his answer at his press conference yesterday was very telling. He wishes, hopes and would like it to happen, but he is not actually doing anything to achieve that objective. Under his watch, adult homelessness, child homelessness and pensioner homelessness figures are higher than ever in modern records.

One of the odd things about the budget is that despite the high-profile Government announcement in the summer of the new secure tenancy affordable rental, STAR, investment initiative, there is no capital allocated in voted expenditure. We are very interested to hear from the Minister, at the earliest opportunity, where that funding is coming from because it is not in the budget book and it was not in his press conference yesterday.

There is then this interesting, ambiguous and as yet unagreed promise of Land Development Agency, LDA, capitalisation. If the Minister had secured an additional €6 billion for housing through LDA capitalisation, that would have been in the statements of both Ministers, Deputies Michael McGrath and Donohoe. In fact, it would have been the headline item in the opening remarks made by the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, at his press conference, but it was buried away. When he was asked reasonable questions by journalists, he could not answer because he does not yet actually know how much he will get, given he has not got the information. The sooner he can provide clarity on that, the better.

This is a status quobudget, which means that in housing, things will remain the same and for many people, things will get worse. Given the scale of the finances available yesterday, this could have been a game-changing budget. It could have been about undoing the damage the Minister and his colleagues have done in recent years and giving some hope to people desperate to own or rent an affordable home, to get a council home or to get out of emergency accommodation. In fact, all those homeowners with building defects were very surprised to see only an additional €5 million in the pot for building defects. Where is the money for the new scheme the Minister is promising to open next year going to be? It is not in the budget announced yesterday. My colleagues are correct; the Minister has squandered an enormous opportunity. It is clear the Minister has thrown in the towel. Otherwise, he would have spent a full five minutes telling us why this budget was so good.

Therefore, as I have said previously and will continue to say until the next general election, he is making things worse and it is time for him to go. Let the electorate decide who they want to lead the Government, who they want to be in charge of housing and who they think is best placed to undo the damage of decades of bad Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael housing policy.

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