Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)

This Government is a record breaking Government for all the wrong reasons. There have been record rents, record house prices and record numbers of people who are homeless. The average price of a residential property sold in 2025 was €426,000. I could not believe the figure when I saw it. It is eight times the average income at the moment. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is now more than €2,000 per month and the availability of homes to rent has halved since pre-Covid-19 pandemic times. Some 16,600 people are currently languishing in homelessness; 5,200 of them are children and 402 people have died in homelessness in Dublin in five years. For much of the rest of the country that figure is not even measured.

The truth is that the Government is going into reverse in housing. Only 30,000 homes were built last year.

That was a reduction on the year before and left the Government well short of the target. Planning permissions are falling. Planning permissions for apartments have collapsed. Last year, the Government said that it was going to build 12,930 social homes. It missed that target by 2,300. The key problems are not being tackled. Those problems are Government bureaucracy and red tape, a lack of viability, a lack of key infrastructure and a lack of serviced zoned land.

One of the big shocks is that in the middle of a housing crisis, so many construction companies are idle. Many are placing their staff abroad because they cannot work here. They say that no proper pipeline of work is coming through for them here, which is absolutely incredible. The planning situation in this country is mental. It is completely crazy. I heard about a 30,000-page planning permission application for a particular project that the fact that vans were needed to transport it. In the context of another planning permission application, four separate versions of the same plan were required in order to suit four separate agencies. The greater Dublin drainage project, the purpose of which is to help service 100,000 homes, has been in planning for the past ten years. It is now in judicial review again, and is likely to be tied up for many more years. In Ireland, there are 26 judicial reviews per 1 million people. In Britain, it is five per 1 million. Judicial reviews are becoming a national sport in this country.

The issuing of permits and licences in this country under the Government is the slowest in Europe. The tendering process under the Government is one of the slowest in Europe. This has not evolved out of thin air. It has been created by the Government. The lack of infrastructure is hammering the building of homes. Representatives of Uisce Éireann were before the infrastructure committee recently. I asked them how long it is going to take for Uisce Éireann to fill the gaps that are currently acting as a block to the building of homes. They said, proudly, that they will have it done by 2050. That is an incredible situation. At present, Uisce Éireann can hardly keep the water in the taps of houses in County Meath. Thousands of homes are waiting to be built in my county. There is a lack of electricity, water and roads, and that is the Government's responsibility.

I have a different view from those in other Opposition parties. The Government's plan is a tweaker's charter. In other words, it is a case of a little bit here, a little bit there, a grant here and a grant there. The Government does not have the ambition that is needed to fix this problem. When it deliver the radical change that is needed?

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