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

My focus now, fundamentally, is to work on a whole set of policies that can get us more houses built faster for young people in particular, so that they can afford to either buy or rent homes. There is a range of issues we have to examine in that regard and continue to develop. As I said, we have already allocated an additional €800 million in respect of housing in the first two to three months of this Government, over and above what was allocated, to get more housing through.

The Deputy referenced planning permissions. Planning permission was granted for about 32,000 new homes last year. That is 21% down on the previous year but interestingly, while there was about 3% of a reduction in houses, the big dip was in apartments - 39% in apartment permissions compared with the previous years. I have said in here from day one of this new Government that this is an issue which, collectively, has to be looked at. I said we have to work on methods and ways of getting the private sector involved, particularly in brownfield sites.

Of course, what the Deputy and others did was just grab it and go off on a propaganda spin saying, "He is going to increase rents or do this and that", none of which I said. I never said any of it. It did not stop the Deputy from saying that is what I said. We need to look at it, and we need to look at how we create an investment climate that will draw in additional private sector investment to at least come up somewhere close to, and parallel with, what the State is investing in social housing.

In 2023, planning permissions went up 21%. You are looking at a very high level in 2023; that came down significantly in 2024. Obviously, we want it to continue to go up. In the past five years alone, 119,000 first-time buyer mortgages have been drawn down. That is in the past five years to the end of 2024. Fundamentally, there has been far greater access to first-time homes and so on over the last number of years because of the significant increase, where we did go from 20,000 per annum in 2020 up to around 30,000-plus in 2022, 2023 and 2024. We need to get up much higher. We want to get to 41,000 this year. It is going to be very challenging; there is no easy answer to that, and again-----

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