Micheál Martin (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The bottom line is that the State has intervened very strongly and assertively in the housing market. The State is the main player, I would argue, in the housing market right now in terms of the level of State investment. That is increasing and has increased over the last number of years. As I said yesterday, we are at record levels of social housing new builds compared with the last three decades. The Deputy can go back and compare and contrast. We need to get that figure of 8,000-plus to about 10,000 new builds and add about 2,000 more in terms of leasing to deal with homelessness cases and new acquisitions.

The Deputy keeps saying things we have not said. I never said that we wanted to increase rents or end the RPZs. I challenged her last week to produce a quote where I said I would end RPZs and of course she cannot find one because it does not exist.

I am struck by the degree to which the debate gets so easily distorted by commentary in the public sphere. It is interesting. There seems to be no space to tease out and discuss issues without the immediate assertion, allegation or branding of a comment into a nice box that fits the political slogans and so on but does not add any solutions to anything. The real debate in the election was how to get to 50,000 units per annum because every party accepted the figure of 50,000 that the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, says we need. The Labour Party came forward with the national housing construction agency with very little detail on it. Even when I met it subsequently in the context of Government formation, there was very little detail on it. There was no paper or document. It seemed to go back to the direct labour approach. The Labour Party seemed to envisage a national construction agency that would employ thousands of people to build homes. That is not feasible in the current era. It will not happen and it would delay the process of house building even further.

The Labour Party had further ideas around the LDA, which were unspecified. It took two years to legislate for the LDA. My argument during the election debate with Deputy Bacik was quite simply that all of that would delay and disrupt the momentum of trying to get more houses built. We need more houses to be built. We need to get the existing agencies, local authorities, approved housing bodies and the LDA working and not be formulating new schemes and agencies which, by definition, all takes time. That was the Labour Party proposition.

For example, the Deputy made comments about my statement about getting private sector investment in. It is like performance arts in here. One would imagine I had said something terrible when I said we need to get private sector investment in.

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