Micheál Martin

-----about your false assertions.

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 of wher…

There was no clear blueprint, no paper in respect of how this agency was going to be established.

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 of house co…

Two and a bit months-----

It is two months in office, despite Deputies' best efforts. An extra €800 million on top of the outturn last year has been allocated to housing. There is €450 million for 3,000 new homes and also funding to fund substantial numbers of tenant in situ homes under that particular programme. The State's investment is enormous relative to historic norms in respect of housing in this country. That is wh…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 the Depu…

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 three months of…

First of all, the 41,000 remains a target.

Just on the issue-----

I am answering it. I am going to answer-----

On the data the Deputy is talking about, the Central Bank published the September figures-----

Hold on a second-----

Deputy Doherty is not answering the question. Sit down.

I am not misleading the Dáil at all.

Deputy Doherty did.

The fundamental point I am making is that the figures the Deputy is making a big song and dance about were published, not by the Department of Finance, but by the Central Bank in September. The Deputy and I knew them, but we had other figures saying they would be higher. The Central Bank-----

Deputy Doherty was not asking the question. It was the Social Democrats.

The point I am trying to make to the Deputy is there were different estimates and so on about targets.

The previous year, the Central Bank underestimated what we would increase by.