The Government came to office four months ago promising to take major action on housing. The harrowing stories from people whose lives have been ruined by the housing crisis are well known to all of us: young couples who cannot afford a home of their own, some living with their children in the box room of their mammy's house; struggling renters who hand a chunk of their wages over to landlords every month; and families on council waiting lists for years, with no light at the end of the tunnel. For an entire generation, the security of having an affordable roof over their heads has been reduced to a pipe dream, and this is the devastating result of decades of bad housing policy from successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael-led Governments.

The lack of urgency from the Government on this matter is very concerning. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, spent the entire summer on the media telling people that he would publish his affordable housing plan in September, but September came, September went and still no affordable housing materialised. The budget came in October and it, too, was a massive disappointment. The housing measures fell far short of what is needed to deal with the most serious affordable and social housing crisis in the history of the State. More new money will go to private landlords and private developers than will go towards genuinely affordable homes for working people. So long as housing policy in this State is directed by and for wealthy developers and landlords, we will never fix the housing crisis and our people will continue to suffer.

We see from the latest daft.ie report, published on Monday, that renters are still suffering because of a failure of the Government to act. The report shows that rents are rising right across the State, with increases of almost 3% outside Dublin in the past year. It is alarming to see rental increases of almost 5% in Cork, Galway and Waterford and hikes as large as 7% in counties such as Wexford. The average State-wide rent now stands at €1,419 per month. New Dublin city rents now average €2,028. There is no good news for renters here in the capital. This crisis is clearly getting worse. Just as when it comes to affordable housing, there is no response from the Minister. Budget 2021 contained nothing for renters, no action to stop rent rises, no measures to put money back in renters' pockets and no funding to deliver the volume of affordable cost-rental accommodation that our cities and our country desperately need. These are the measures and solutions that Sinn Féin has consistently urged the Government to adopt, and ignoring these solutions was a serious failure on its part.

In the midst of the pandemic, hard-pressed tenants are paying the price of this failure in the form of increasing rents. Surely an emergency of this nature should have been a catalyst to deliver secure and affordable housing. Instead, people got the opposite: higher rents and a higher cost of living, which is incredible. What does the Taoiseach propose to do about this? Does he now recognise and accept that there is an urgent and immediate need for his Government to introduce measures to stop rent increases? When will we finally see his Government's affordable housing plan?

The language used by the Deputy is quite propagandistic. To describe a €3.3 billion budget allocation as "massively disappointing" is extraordinary by any yardstick. Fianna Fáil has not been in power for ten years. That is just the reality and the facts, but Sinn Féin never allows facts get in the way of anything.

The bottom line is that we want to build social housing and we want to build it at scale. That is what this budget allocation does. We also want to build affordable houses. Supply is the key to the housing crisis. We know that over the past number of years there has been a crisis in housing supply and an issue in terms of affordability and the provision of social homes. That is why more than €3 billion was secured in the budget to provide the resources to get started on what will be the biggest social housing building programme in the history of the State. Next year, we will build 9,500 social homes as part of an overall delivery of 12,750 social homes. That is a 22% increase on the 2020 target of 7,736. Obviously, Covid-19 has impacted on housebuilding in 2020.

The budget also provides for a suite of affordability measures totalling €468 million. That will be spread out across the serviced sites fund, the local infrastructure housing activation fund, the Rebuilding Ireland home loan scheme and the Land Development Agency. Some €110 million has been provided for the affordable housing and cost-rental schemes and €435 million will go towards a new programme for funding the delivery of cost-rental homes. That will see funding made available to approved housing bodies in 2021. The new cost-rental equity loan will allow approved housing bodies to borrow up to 30% of the cost of cost-rental homes from the State and is modelled on, but completely separate from, the successful capital advance leasing facility model for funding social housing. In addition, the Land Development Agency has indicated its intention to include a significant proportion of cost-rental homes on its portfolio of sites over the coming years. This will further increase the scale of this new sector.

As the Deputy will be aware, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has approved the next phase of the Shanganagh site which is Ireland's largest proposed social and affordable scheme to receive planning permission. That is important and is illustrative of the type of progress that is being and will be made. The Government has identified housing as its number one priority in the programme for Government. Over the next number of years, it is determined to deal with it and ensure, through a combination of measures on social housing, affordable homes and rental, that we allocate the necessary resources on a multi-annual basis so that certainty will be given to local authorities and approved housing bodies and that they can proceed with their plans.

We are also keen to accelerate and encourage new housing supply for rent and purchase in order to keep existing rental units in the market and to bring vacant homes back into use, including those vacated by fair deal participants. Significant changes to the criteria for rent pressure zones, RPZs, which were introduced in the Act to considerably strengthen those zones, remove a number of opt-outs and give new substantial legal powers and resources to the Residential Tenancies Board to enforce rent controls affectively. A key element of existing policy centres on the designation of RPZs in areas where rents are highest and increasing most, the effect of which is to limit the increase in rents to 4% per annum. At this stage, more than 73% of the 364,099 tenancies in the private rental sector are covered by RPZ designations. That type of approach on the part of the Government will continue. Those restrictions have had a moderating effect on rent increases and have given certainty to landlords and tenants alike. Essentially, however, the essence of our programme is not developer-related at all. It is designed to give the resources to local authorities and approved housing bodies to build more social homes than we have ever built before.

How are these for some facts that the Taoiseach might acquaint himself with? Fact one is that RPZs do not, have not and will not work. Fact two is the evidence, if the Taoiseach cares to see it, that rents are rising. The average rent is more than €1,400 across the State. That is astonishing. By the way, this is not for the Taj Mahal, it is for a two-bedroom unit here in Dublin city. How is this for a fact? The Government has not produced its affordable housing plan. The Taoiseach should not accuse me of propagandistic speech when I simply present him with those facts. It is extraordinary that the Taoiseach could big-up his budget of all budgets of €3.3 billion for housing and yet deliver nothing, zilch, nada for renters. The Government delivers plenty for landlords because, despite what he says, that is still the focus of its policy. What is the Taoiseach going to do for those young workers and families who must find more than €2,000 here in Dublin city, or more than €1,400 elsewhere across the State, every month to hand over to landlords. Where is the relief and support now for those people and those families?

It would be useful if people compared and contrasted the Sinn Féin performance in government on housing to that of the current Government here in terms of protecting tenants. Under a Sinn Féin Minister with responsibility for housing, for example, the recent private tenancies legislation in the North simply extended the termination period to 12 weeks, with the courts starting to hear eviction proceedings from 31 August. The protections Sinn Féin brought in where it is in government are far less than what we have been doing here in the Republic, where there have been more comprehensive measures to protect tenants from eviction, particularly in the context of Covid-19. That is never acknowledged and the contrast is quite stark in terms of how people are treated under Sinn Féin where it is in government and the parties in government in the Republic.

We acknowledge that there is much work to be done here. The Deputy is correct in saying we have only been in government for a number of months. Budget 2021 puts its stamp on it, however, and states unequivocally that, with multi-annual funding, we want to engage in the largest social housing building programme over the next five years. That is our agenda and that is what we will do. There is also affordable housing, of course, and we have a suite of other measures to enable us to do that.