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

I thank the Deputy for her kind words on a personal level. As a new TD and a party leader, she has had a meteoric and dramatic rise in politics and I wish her the best in the future. I mean that because we need new people and young people in politics.

The work of the Government will continue. I have made that clear, as have the other party leaders who make up the majority in the Dáil. Any Government has to be bigger than any one person in it and this Government has always been so. I have no doubt that it will do its work and possibly do it better under future leadership than it has to date. We have faced a lot of challenges - enormous challenges - since I first took that minibus to Áras an Uachtaráin in 2011. We had mass unemployment. People were leaving the country in droves because they could not find employment and we have turned that around. We had a big budget deficit. Maybe people forget what that means. It is not a numerical thing. It meant that we sat down as Ministers every couple of months writing a budget - "How do we cut another €400 million?" or "How do we take €600 million out of that?" Even Opposition parties had produce policy showing how they would cut spending. They should think how different it would be for them now if they had to produce policy papers about how they would raise taxes and cut spending. Those are the kind of things we had to do.

The Deputy mentioned emigration. For the past couple of years anyway, emigration has been very much a two-way street.

There are as many Irish citizens coming home as there are leaving. That was not the case back in 2011, 2012 or 2013. Indeed, one of the reasons rents were so much lower was that there were so many empty apartments and houses in the city of Dublin and other cities because people had to leave to find employment. We had to deal with Brexit and the enormous challenge of preventing a hard Border between North and South. That was an enormous challenge. Three deals had to be negotiated with the British Government to secure that, all of which were done during my term as Taoiseach. We had a pandemic, during which we were one of the best performing countries in the world in terms of lives saved and jobs protected. We have come through now, I believe, a very serious cost-of-living and inflation crisis, which is now coming to an end.

The truth is that we are never going to wake up in a country that does not have problems or challenges. There will always be problems and challenges. There will always be a crisis, and if not one, there will be two or three. That perfect country that has no problems does not exist. It only exists in fairy tales. We should be honest with the public about that. Yes, we do face an enormous challenge with housing and we have worked very hard on it. Supply is now double what it was when I first became Taoiseach. I think it can double again. First-time buyers are buying homes now at a rate we have not seen in nearly 20 years. Social housing is being built at a rate we have not seen since before either Deputy Cairns or I were born. I wish we could have done more and done it faster. Absolutely, I do. My biggest regret, if there is one, is that it is not possible to solve all the country's problems at once, but we will keep working on it.

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