Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

No. The people you like to describe as elites and everything else are the people we rely on to build homes in this country. The measures we have taken are making a real difference. I do not think when you, Eoin Ó Broin and others meet these lads, you use the same sort of language towards them as you use in this Dáil. The lobbying register shows you are meeting most of them. I do not think when you meet them you describe them in the way you do in this House. You have also come in today, and you tried this at the finance committee yesterday, to try to suggest the measures we have taken to assist small landlords are somehow disproportionate to the measures we have taken for renters. Lest there be any doubt, the budget package we have in place to help renters, the renters' tax credit, is three times the cost to the Exchequer as the tax credit for landlords to try to keep people in the rental market.

You cannot have homes to rent if you do not have people who are willing to rent their home. Please do not continue to misrepresent the steps this Government is taking to deliver infrastructure, to deliver homes, to support jobs and, crucially, to invest more in our public services. That is what budgets are about too; making sure when somebody needs to access healthcare, education or a disability service, that we are properly and adequately resourcing it.

When people look back at this budget, which is one of five in a five-year term, they will see we have taken decisions that will make a fundamental difference to housing supply, to jobs and employment, and to protecting our country. That is what many of the people on the doors I knock on want to see from a Government too.

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