Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)
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434. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the measures taken to implement a State savings scheme such as the Social Democrats-proposed ‘Homes for Ireland’ State savings scheme, submitted to him and the Taoiseach on 19 May 2025, which would leverage the €160 billion in deposits to fund affordable housing delivery. [36247/25]

James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail)
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The Government committed in January 2025 to introduce an all of government national housing plan to follow Housing for All, underpinned by multi-annual funding. As part of this, all Departments have been examining all potential actions to further scale up the delivery of homes of all tenures.

A programme of targeted stakeholder engagement has also been undertaken. Written submissions have been received from a range of external stakeholders including state agencies, the community and voluntary sector, industry and academics. These submissions are being carefully considered and I have also met with many stakeholders to hear first-hand what actions they think should be reflected in the Plan.

There is a high rate of savings in the State and indeed the high savings deposit rate we see in Ireland today reflects the success of our economy in recent years. Some stakeholders have suggested that more could be done to harness those domestic savings to fund housing delivery, including introducing a state savings scheme similar to the Livret A model in France.

I would like thank to Deputy Hearne for providing the Social Democrats “Homes for Ireland’ State savings scheme proposal which puts forward a similar model to provide capital for the delivery of affordable homes.

As the area of savings comes under the remit of the Minister for Finance, I have asked my Department to engage with his Department to establish the potential benefits of the introduction of any further new savings scheme specific to housing over and above the products which are already available to the public.