Dáil debates

Thursday, 22 February 2024

Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions

 

12:00 pm

The reason I say that is that, of course, the Deputy did not wish to highlight that between 2022 and 2023 up to 22,000 social houses have been delivered by this Government. This is a record high, and about 26,000 more social homes are in the pipeline.

On the affordable aspect, the Deputy spoke about change. Sinn Féin's change would be a change for the worse. Why do I say this? It is because in the alternative Sinn Féin budget, which was published, it was proposed to abolish the help-to-buy scheme, which has supported more than 40,000 home buyers. The Deputy's party would get rid of that support for affordability to enable young people to afford to buy their first home. The party would also scrap the first homes scheme, which gives up to 30% in equity share in new properties and enables people to be able to buy their homes. The State will take an equity share of up to 30% in this context. There have been 2,600 approvals already under that scheme in just over one year. Sinn Féin, though, would again scrap this measure. It would also eliminate the new vacant and derelict property grants of €70,000, for which more than 4,500 applications have already been submitted and 200 approvals to date. Equally, significant supports for affordable housing would be scrapped in the party's budget, amounting to up to €260 million.

That is what the party has proposed. The issue is that Sinn Féin does not have a plan. It has a few pages stitched together, as in the party's housing policy budget, which we have read. The party would scrap support for homeownership. It would increase taxes on inheriting the family home by a substantial amount, close to €36,000 on the average family home. It would scrap the support. It would also then, as I said, abolish the key schemes that give real support to young people who wish to buy their first homes. Some 550 first-time buyers are now buying homes each week. Mortgage drawdowns for first-time buyers have reached a new peak, with there having been about 26,000 in 2022. This is the highest annual level since 2007, which the Deputy did not acknowledge. We have also expanded the help-to-buy scheme.

We want to do more and we have to do more given the population increase and the scale of the challenges out there. We have substance in our planning, however. We are not opposing projects like the development at the Oscar Traynor site, which Sinn Féin did, or at Ballymastone or other big projects that would have delivered social and affordable housing much faster if it were not for all the prevarication you people engaged in on the councils, especially in Dublin. The Deputy's party just has sound bites. It has only about four or five pages of a plan. That is all it has. It keeps talking about change. It is a great sound bite. The oldest sound bite in elections is "Vote for change".

I warn people not to vote for the abolition of the help-to-buy scheme, the derelict house grant-----

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