Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)

This Government has been an absolute disaster when it comes to building homes. It is by far the biggest failure of this Government over the past while and it is hitting families massively and especially young people hard.

House prices are now eight times the average earnings and the average house price sold last year was €426,000, an amazing figure. The average rent currently for a two-bedroom home is €2,000 and the availability of homes has crashed since pre-Covid levels. Incredibly, we have 16,600 people languishing in homes in this country, with 5,200 of those citizens being children. Some 402 people have died in homelessness just in Dublin in a five-year period. The figure is far higher throughout the country but that figure is not even measured in any other local authority outside of Dublin.

There is a great character in Meath who I knew for years. In his words, "This Government is improving worse." The Government is in reverse in terms of its projections. A total of 30,000 homes were built last year, down from the year before and far lower than the targets. Planning permissions are falling and we predict worsening figures. There are several key reasons for this. The first is this Government's bureaucracy and red tape. Planning, permits, licensing, tenders and judicial reviews are all way too slow and are all delaying homes. I was talking to a builder in Meath just yesterday who has been waiting 20 months for his application that is still stuck in An Coimisiún Pleanála. That is 20 months he has been waiting for that application to come back. The State is slowing the building of homes.

The second biggest issue is missing infrastructure. Uisce Éireann was in with the committee a while ago. I asked when all the gaps in the water infrastructure that are stopping the building of homes would be complete and it said 2050. That is an incredible statistic. The third issue is available zoned land. Builders are not able to find the available zoned land that is serviced to be able to build their homes but there is a big issue of viability here. In the vast majority of counties across the country, many builders are simply not working. They are not building homes and if they are building homes, they are building extensions and a few one-off houses. They currently cannot make money building homes in this country.

Construction companies are sending their workers abroad for contracts at present. Some 30 of the top 50 companies are sending their workers abroad to work because they cannot make projects viable here. We need €20 billion to build 50,000 homes. There is €9 billion going in for social housing, which is great and Aontú wants to see significantly more, but there is still a gap of €10 billion in the building of homes.

For years, this Government has only had the idea that the private sector should build homes but the truth is the critiques on this side have only had the proposal of building public sector homes. This bird needs two wings to fly. It needs public construction but it also needs private construction. The only way we can do that is to make it viable. Currently, I cannot understand parties holding back in tools and levers, which would make the building of homes more viable.

I used to work on a construction site 25 years ago as a labourer and I remember we had a Donegal builder at the time. Many people used to come in and tell him "This is wrong, that is wrong, this cannot work" but his attitude was "Just build it up." Sometimes I think of this Dáil like a busy place where everybody can think of why things should not be done but let us just get building it. Let us get ambitious and let us release the levers in terms of making sure it is viable.

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