Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I was really glad to hear one of the Government TDs at the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach earlier say a number of times that we should declare a housing emergency. Even the Government's own TDs are saying it. Its councillors and candidates on the ground recognise it and they are saying the same thing. The Minister needs to listen to them, but they also need to take ownership of it because they are part of a party that designed and constructed where we are today, whether that be in terms of failing to build houses or transferring €1 billion every year to the HAP scheme and all of that. Housing is the single biggest issue facing our country. How we respond now as a people to this historical challenge will resonate for generations. Sinn Féin believes in the power of housing to transform so many parts of our society and economy.

I know this Government is not serious. The reason I know that is because it has no interest in making housing affordable. I know that because its members refuse to say they want house prices to come down. They just want to build enough to appease people, but not enough to address the housing crisis or emergency. Too many people are making too much money from the current situation. They are doing so off the backs of ordinary workers and families. They are either willing to ignore the hardship people face or deny it.

Less than half of the 150 houses promised in County Mayo were built in 2023, and not a single affordable public home was built there. Sinn Féin will deliver affordable housing in every county. The Government did not even meet half of its own modest targets, but everyone suffers when the Government fails to deliver social and affordable homes. Less supply means higher house prices and unaffordable rents. These failures mean more and more of peoples' hard-earned wages being handed over to landlords and banks. It is hard to overstate the economic damage this is doing overall. The average age of the people who can buy houses is 40. This is the single biggest factor in driving the birth rate lower and lower. It is why we have a looming pension crisis. The failure of this Government to address housing and the success it had in constructing the housing crisis as it is impacting every bit of our society. I am sorry but that is a fact. This did not happen by accident. I wonder about the cost of the number of children who are homeless and the cost we are going to pay into the future.

I move amendment No. 1:

To delete all the words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following: "notes that:

— Housing for All – A New Housing Plan for Ireland, now in its third year of implementation, sets out a comprehensive suite of actions aimed at addressing affordability in the housing sector and that supply, which is critical to achieving this, has increased significantly since its publication in September 2021;

— almost 33,000 new homes were built in 2023 alone, exceeding the target of 29,000 by some 3,700 homes, and this represents the most new homes delivered in 15 years, with a further 5,841 homes added to the national housing stock in Q1 2024;

— in the first quarter of 2024, 11,956 new homes commenced, a 63 per cent increase on the same period in 2023, and the highest number of quarter 1 commencements since the data series began in 2015; and

— the Government is providing €5.1 billion capital investment in 2024, the highest level of funding for housing in the history of the State, to accelerate the delivery of new homes and increase the supply necessary to reduce homelessness and moderate house and rental prices;

recognises that an increased delivery of social and affordable homes is at the heart of Housing for All – A New Housing Plan for Ireland and welcomes that:

— in 2023, 11,939 new social homes were delivered, surpassing the 2022 delivery figure of 10,263 social homes by 16.33 per cent, and this includes 8,110 new-build homes, 1,830 acquisitions and 1,999 homes delivered through leasing programmes;

— this delivery is the highest annual output of social homes in decades and the highest level of new-build social housing since 1975, and when the Housing Assistance Payment (8,292) and Rental Accommodation Scheme (1,542) are included, 21,773 social housing supports were delivered in 2023;

— over 4,000 affordable housing supports were delivered in 2023 via Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs), local authorities, the Land Development Agency (LDA), through the First Home Scheme, the Cost Rental Tenant-in-Situ Scheme and the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant;

— this represents an increase of 128 per cent on 2022 activity, which saw the first affordable homes delivered in a generation;

— over 1,600 cost rental homes have already been delivered by AHBs, local authorities and the LDA;

— funding is approved to support the delivery of more than 4,000 affordable homes (affordable purchase and cost rental) by 21 local authorities with the support of almost €330m in grant assistance from the Affordable Housing Fund; and

— over 7,700 Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant applications have been made, with over 4,621 already approved and 300 grants issued to date and based on current grant approvals and timelines to complete approved works, the set target of 4,000 by 2025 will be achieved in 2025;

acknowledges the ongoing efforts to secure pathways out of homelessness for individuals, families and children and notes that:

— Budget 2024 provides an allocation of €242m for homeless services, and this funding will support those experiencing homelessness with emergency accommodation and the supports that they need to exit homelessness to a tenancy; and

— in 2023, local authorities and AHBs made c. 1,300 acquisitions under the Social Housing Tenant-in-Situ scheme and the Government has approved local authorities and AHBs to acquire a further 1,300 social homes in 2024;

also notes that the delivery pipeline for new build social homes is very positive with over 22,000 homes on site or at design and tender stage; and

agrees that the continued implementation of Housing for All – A New Housing Plan for Ireland represents the most appropriate response to deal with the housing challenges which Ireland is now facing.".

I am glad to again have the opportunity to speak not only about the progress we are making under Housing for All but also to call out some of the rank hypocrisy in the Sinn Féin motion. I will begin with the progress, which is undeniable. Home building in Ireland is making a comeback, as anyone who goes to any town, village or city will see. More homes were completed in 2023 than had been since 2008. Building started on more homes in 2023 than in a decade, while in the first quarter of this year, there were 1,000 new commencements per week. That is the capacity we are building, even though there are still many issues to be addressed, which I will deal with in a moment. It is also a fact, not referred to by any of the Sinn Féin Deputies, that more first-time buyers bought a home in 2023 than had been the case in 16 years, and that Government investment and initiatives are prompting this progress. After more than a decade of undersupply, unquestionably, a lot of demand has not been met over a ten-year period, but that cannot be turned around in two, three or four years.

The tide is turning, however, and every effort is focused on growing the momentum further, as it will do this year. The recent EUROCONSTRUCT by EY shows construction output in Ireland is forecast to grow this year, whereas in other European countries surveyed, it is expected to fall by more than 2%. This does not happen by accident or by a trite motion put down in the House. It happens with real policies backed by investment. The construction sector in Ireland has the confidence, because of the Government’s housing strategies, to scale up the supply of homes because, very simply, the Government is backing families and individuals to buy them. It is doing so with record investment, of €5.1 billion this year. It is doing it through schemes such as the help-to-buy grants, about which many Sinn Féin Deputies have tabled parliamentary questions, yet their party spokesperson wants it to be abolished. The help-to-buy grant amounts to €30,000 of a person's own tax back into their pocket to help with their deposit. Approximately 45,000 individuals have claimed that grant, yet Sinn Féin would abolish it. It has said that openly, although Deputy Ó Broin’s party leader seems to disagree with him somewhat on that. That is people's own tax, which they have paid, given back to assist them with their deposit, and 45,000 households have claimed that grant.

Progress is also being led through the first-homes scheme, which is bridging the gap for thousands of buyers, providing them with the finance they need to buy their own home. As of yesterday, 9,675 had registered for that scheme, while 4,359 approvals had issued. Again, this is a scheme Sinn Féin would scrap, which has seen 4,359 approvals. It wants to get rid of the very schemes that are making housing affordable for buyers, and it is naked political opportunism at its finest, not least given Sinn Féin Deputies continue to table parliamentary questions to look for changes to these schemes it has said it would abolish. It needs to be honest with people about that.

For the Opposition to succeed, it needs housing to fail and it will do everything it can to make it fail, whether that is voting against housing developments in the Deputies' own areas and throughout the country or deliberately misleading people about the supports available to them. It sees the housing crisis as a problem to be exploited, not a challenge to be solved, and it talks our problems up and our country down. It will put forward no credible alternative, because if this motion is supposed to be a housing plan and a new departure for Sinn Féin - I will deal with the leaseholding issue in a moment - it is very light on any detail, and we are still waiting more than a year for its alternative to Housing for All. It says it will sell homes at prices below €300,000, which is great and sounds good, and in some areas we are able to do that.

Every time in this House we have asked how it would do that, however, especially in the context of the comments of its party leader about decreasing house values in Dublin to €300,000, it has not answered even the simplest of questions about how that would be done. Sinn Féin's motion today - this calls out another contradiction in its approach - refers to the waiving of development levies, when only last week it opposed the extension of the waiving of development levies. It issued a press statement criticising it, yet its motion refers to waiving development levies. Interestingly, the motion refers to its affordable leasehold purchase scheme, but we have very little detail about that, so I hope its Deputies will flesh that out. I have a number of questions I am hoping they may be able to answer for me today.

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