Results 741-760 of 49,960 for speaker:Micheál Martin
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: The bottom line is this-----
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: -----the only way you ultimately find out is in the first quarter of the following year.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: The first quarter of the following year, you get the data.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: In previous years, people said we would not reach our targets.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: We actually exceeded them. Some of the estimates, even from official circles, were wrong-----
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: -----for the previous year. There was no-----
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: I repeat this-----
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: There was no attempt to knowingly mislead the people on any of this.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: We have worked extremely hard on the housing question. It is our number one priority. It will remain our number one priority.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: The focus has to be on how we get those numbers.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: The Deputy attacks because the target last year was not met. When the target was exceeded in 2022 and 2023, the Deputy's line was that the targets were not high enough. No matter what target gets set in here, the Deputy will always find a way to say that the Government is either not setting a target high enough, or if it exceeds it, it clearly did not set it high enough, and so forth. Now...
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: 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...
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: Obviously the county councils and the city councils will then have to adopt and change their plans to allow for more zoning to allow more houses to be constructed.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: I would appreciate if Deputy Bacik would send me a paper on the housing solidarity bond. It is a headline at the moment but if she can send me a paper on it we will examine it. Effectively, through the CREL initiative, for example, and the LDA has effectively been upfronting the financing of a lot of private sector housing. That is de facto what is happening right now through the LDA.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: There is an issue with the cost of financing but the State cannot be the first and last bank of resort in respect of house construction. Probably up to €7 billion and more this year is the totality of State spending on housing.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: Whatever way we look at it, we do have to look at the cost of financing and I have mentioned here that the commercial banks have to do more in respect of lending at sustainable rates to builders to build in the private sector. We will continue to focus on that work.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: As of now the State is already in the space of facilitating acting as a catalyst in terms of the private sector, with State underpinning essentially or back up.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: I am always open to new ideas, to concrete and substantive ideas. I was not particularly impressed with what the Labour Party put forward in the general election campaign. Establishing a new national building agency would have only delayed things. It would take years to establish and it is a kind of rowing the clock back to earlier eras and to models that simply would not work now in terms...
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: There was no clear blueprint, no paper in respect of how this agency was going to be established.
- Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions (19 Mar 2025)
Micheál Martin: If the Deputy has other ideas, that is fine, but they have to be focused on getting more houses built and getting them built faster, which I have said consistently over the last while. From about 2020 onwards about 130,000 new homes were built, which is more than anything in the previous decade or more. Momentum did switch. There was a turn and a significant shift in momentum in terms...