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

When I first became Taoiseach in 2017, we were only building around 14,000 new homes a year in the State. That has more than doubled. We are up to 30,000 and I would like to see it double again by the end of the decade. I believe that is possible.

The target we set of building 29,000 new homes this year is a target, not a ceiling. We intend to exceed it, just as we did last year. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, is working on revised targets for the coming years. We have advice from the Housing Commission and we also have advice from the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI. We have to take both sets of advice into account. I expect that early in the new year we will increase our housing targets for the years ahead for the reasons the Deputy gave. We should also include in those targets student accommodation, which currently counts for nothing. That does not make sense to me. Those targets should also include bringing vacant and derelict homes back into use because they also count for nothing at present and they should count.

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