Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ministers and their teams for their contributions. I want to follow on from some of the questions I asked yesterday evening about the housing element of all of this. The statement says that €4.2 billion is to be allocated to the Department of housing, €2.5 billion of which is specifically for the housing capital allocation.

Last year - I am just reading the website here - there was a €5.1 billion capital investment in housing, of which €2.6 billion was in Exchequer, €978 million for the LDA and €1.5 billion for the Housing Finance Agency. I assume money in budget 2025 for the LDA and the Housing Finance Agency will be dealt with separately? Will we see that? The €2.5 billion the Minister has here is marginally less than what he gave last year.

I just cannot get my head around that. At that level of funding, there is going to be no change to the Housing for All plan with regard to what is made available to the Department to address a housing crisis, and I do not need to tell the Minister how bad it is. It is getting worse. Am I reading that correctly? Is that what we are looking at here - that the allocation for capital, as set out in the Minister's statement, is marginally less than it was last year? I am reading from the Department of housing here that it was €2.6 billion and the Minister's statement says €2.5 billion.

Then there is the question of the Housing Commission report, which the Government has determinedly refused to debate. It says that there needs to be a dramatic increase in the housing targets - almost a doubling of them - and that a very significant portion of that should be increased provision of social and affordable housing, which logically would follow on with a requirement for a fairly dramatic increase in the capital housing allocation to the Department, which is clearly not there. Can the Minister riddle me this?