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

I thank the Deputy. I do not agree with her remark. The budget contains a number of things that help on housing, such as extending and increasing the rent credit to help renters, extending help to buy to help people buy their first home and a budget of over €5 billion, meaning that we will build records amounts of public housing next year, including social and cost rental housing.

Today, the CSO released its new dwelling completion figures for quarter three of 2023. That shows the number of new homes built in the past three months is up 14% on last year, which means that the rolling yearly completions number is now running ahead of 31,000.

That is very encouraging. I am now increasingly confident that we will beat our housing target for this year. Where have we come from? When my party took office in 2011, only 7000 new homes were built. When I became Taoiseach for the first time in 2017, it was up to 14,000. It is now heading for 31,000 or 32,000. I wish we could do it faster, but that is a more than fourfold increase in the number of new homes being built every year.

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