Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We will hit our social housing target this year. We have delivered over 6,000 affordable housing solutions this year. When we came into government, there were no affordable housing solutions. There was no cost-rental housing or secure tenancies for working people. Nearly 2,000 tenancies have been put in place through cost rental that we legislated for and funded. We will see a continued increase in house building and delivery across the country. In the past 12 months, there have been over 50,000 housing starts.

Regarding the Central Bank projections, that is a matter for it. Central Bank projections in the past couple of years were off and we know what the pipeline is. There is a pipeline of about 25,000 social homes alone being built or in design and planning at this stage. The number of focus remains an increase in housing output, along with good public and affordable housing and private housing.

There are now almost 500 first-time buyers a week purchasing their homes, the highest number since 2006. Many first-time buyers are using the measures we brought in, such as the first homes scheme, which has over 11,000 registrations. The first home scheme bridges the gap for first-time buyers. Nearly 50,000 household have claimed the help-to-buy grant, whereby they get €30,000 of the tax they have paid back into their pockets to help with a deposit. Those numbers are increasing all the time and this will remain our focus.

To be fair, the Deputy and her party colleagues have always been very constructive with regard to the debate on housing. It is still a challenge. The single biggest focus I and this Government have is continuing to exit people from emergency accommodation to safe and secure housing. As the Deputy and I know, as I chair the national homeless action committee, this is a complex issue. People enter into emergency accommodation for a myriad of reasons. Those reasons can include notice to quit, family break-up or a number of other reasons. We publish that data very openly and transparently every single month, as we will do again on the last Friday of this month.

I am optimistic, based on the fact that the number of exits are increasing substantially and nearly a thousand households have been prevented from entering emergency accommodation in quarter 2 of this year due to measures like new build homes and the purchase of homes for tenants in situ, which has been an unquestionable success and is continuing into this year.

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