Yesterday in the Dáil when debating the issue of social housing the Taoiseach said that the socialists want to divide our society into people who live in different areas, with some people paying for everything but qualifying for nothing, following which he checked himself, paused and did not finish the sentence. Perhaps the full sentence was, "some people paying for everything but qualifying for nothing and some people paying for nothing and qualifying for everything"?

Yes.

The Taoiseach did not have to finish the sentence. A dog whistle is a dog whistle, half sentence or full.

When Fintan O'Toole wrote last week in The Irish Times accusing the Government of supporting an ideology, which contains "a profound class prejudice against social housing", he hit the mark.

The Taoiseach made that attack when criticising comments I had made suggesting that public land should not be privatised and should be used entirely for both social and genuinely affordable housing. Income thresholds for social housing should be raised to include more middle-income earners, young people and workers on the average wage currently locked out of the housing market. The State should directly engage builders, write off land prices and value added tax, VAT, and offer genuinely affordable housing at cost price. Rather than sell to developers and define "affordable" as being exorbitant market rates minus a discount, such a model could cut the price of affordable homes from €300,000 plus to less than €200,000 and a 50:50 social and affordable mix is a good mix to build new communities. Who could argue with that? The Taoiseach could and so too last Tuesday night could the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government. He stated that we must avoid "failed policies that did not work before such as building giant social housing estates." Was Ballyphehane a failure? How about Marino or Drimnagh? Was Gurranabraher a failure? These schemes rescued a generation from the lanes and slums. This generation needs to be rescued from being forced to live at home with their parents into their 30s, from sky-high rents which have gone up again today and from the hotels, bed and breakfasts and Garda stations.

The Government is not letting a good crisis go to waste. It is exploiting it to push a privatisation agenda. The Government's vision is for 87,000 households to be housed with housing assistance payment, HAP, landlords in the years to 2021. If that effort was put into building an equivalent number of social homes, €23.8 billion would be saved over 30 years. The Government preaches prudence to the people but the same does not apply when steps are taken to enrich the landlords. The Government wishes to privatise public land and sell houses at unaffordable market rates and unaffordable so-called affordable rates. I conclude by asking the Government to stop the privatisation madness. There is enough public land in the hands of the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and the local authorities alone have zoned enough residential land to build 114,000 homes. How can the Government disagree in the face of all of this evidence that building public homes on public land on a major scale is the only way to go?

I do not know whether the Deputy has noticed but I am not the Taoiseach, nor am I in the habit of finishing anybody else's questions unlike him. However, increasing housing supply is the most fundamental and important issue on the agenda of our Cabinet and Government at the moment because it is raised at every Cabinet meeting and in every session of this Dáil. We intend to introduce affordable housing for purchase, to make sure that cost rental homes will form a major chunk of the landscape in the rental market in the future and to provide €75 million in Exchequer funding to enable infrastructure to be developed on service sites in order that local authorities can open up land for development. The most recent announcement we made a couple of weeks ago was the establishment of one of the most important State organisations in generations, which will open up public land to offer social, private and rental houses to everybody in the market at every cost that they can afford-----

That is all in the future.

I do not know what part of that the Deputy could disagree with but given his practice, I am sure he will find something to disagree with. The fundamental project for this Government is to ensure that anybody who wants to rent, purchase or mortgage a house is able to do so at an affordable rate according to their income. That is the fundamental premise behind what we are trying to do and it is the backdrop of every policy and initiative that has been instigated in the past number of months and that this country will continue to support. The local authorities are starting to gear up and we can see in our towns and villages that houses are starting to be built, maybe not as quickly as the Deputy or I would like, but they are starting. The percentage increases year on year from last year to this are enormous. The figures are still small but they will grow larger. So far this year, in excess of 14,000 homes have been built. It is nowhere close to what is needed but it is a hell of a lot more than the number built last year and the year before.

I reiterate that we have no ideological issue with building any homes. There are a tremendous numbers of people in my party, not just in the parliamentary party, but in towns and villages up and down the country who grew up in county council houses and have no ideology against them whatsoever. I am proud of the community that I came from, which gave me the fundamental beliefs that I hold today. We will build and we will solve the housing crisis. We will not sit on Opposition benches and come up with unworkable and unrealistic claptrap. We will support local authorities and private developers and we will fundamentally open up publicly-owned lands to ensure that people such as couples of all ages can afford to buy or rent in the areas that they want to.

I realise that the Minister is not the Taoiseach-----

That is good.

-----but I note the fact that she did not distance herself one iota from the dog-whistle politics that the Taoiseach demonstrated on the floor yesterday. I note her points on affordable homes but everyone should note the comments of the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government earlier when he repeated his claim that €320,000 falls within the remit of affordable housing as he sees it. I note the Minister for Employment and Social Affairs' points on the Land Development Agency and suffice to say that it will prepare the ground for the biggest privatisation of land in the history of the State. The Government's housing policies are divisive. They are dividing rich from poor and we heard the Taoiseach's rhetoric yesterday about families in hotels being split up and so on but ordinary people are beginning to unite. The single mother who has received notice to quit, the student who cannot afford the rent, the homeless couple, workers on an average wage and ordinary people with a social conscience are giving their support to social movements such as Take Back the City. It is not just in the Dáil that the Government has an alternative and an opposition now but it is on the streets as well and we will see it next Wednesday, 3 October at 12.30 p.m. outside the front of this House when I hope that thousands will converge to demand a major increase in the capital spend on social housing in the budget and I appeal to all, especially young people, to attend that.

If anything, the plans that the Government has announced and will continue to work on are inclusive. They are far from divisive. Building large-scale social developments in the hundreds is divisive-----

How is it divisive for God's sake?

It puts people in segregated areas when we want people to live happily together in communities and that is why mixed developments are the foundation of Government's policy. When we look at the indicators, the figures are trending positively. The number of new homes that have become available for use in the past 12 months to the end of June was 19,650 individual homes. That is a 24% increase on the year from the end of June 2017. Planning permissions were up to 26,752 units to the end of the second quarter of 2018.

That just puts up the value of land.

Commencement notices are up to 19,451 units, a 17% increase from the previous year and registrations are up to 9,269 units, an increase of 9%. The numbers might not be going up as quickly as some people would like but what some Deputies cannot ignore, even though they will do their best to do so, is that the numbers are going in the right direction.