The lives of an entire generation have been defined by a housing crisis. It is a crisis created and worsened by bad Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael policy. For so many people, the aspiration of purchasing or owning their own home has been reduced to a distant pipe dream. For years, people have been calling out for a government that will take the housing crisis seriously and implement a plan that will once again make housing affordable for workers and families on average incomes.

When the Government took power last June, it claimed it would be that Government. It said it would fix housing and introduce a plan that makes an affordable home an achievable goal for ordinary people and families. Then the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy O'Brien, spent month upon month promising an affordable housing plan. We all waited and waited, only to be extremely disappointed by what he and the Government produced and, more than that, to be very angry because the shared equity scheme that the Minister has come up with does absolutely nothing to make housing more affordable. In fact, it will achieve quite the opposite. It will prop up already unaffordable prices and make a bad situation so much worse. His policy could be described as a continuation of disastrous Fine Gael housing policy but also with strong echoes of the failed Celtic tiger policies of the Taoiseach's party, Fianna Fáil. It will have the effect of maintaining unaffordable prices and saddling working people with more unsustainable debt.

I have raised this issue with the Taoiseach before. I have said to him for some time that this plan is dangerous and I have advised him that it will not work. Of course, I have not been on my own. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, the Economic and Social Research Institute and the Central Bank have warned and told the Taoiseach that his scheme will drive prices up. Even the Fine Gael group of councillors on Dublin City Council have begun to see sense and have come out against this scheme. It seems so far that, just as in the bad old days when the Taoiseach was last in government, his Minister seems intent on ploughing on regardless. In the middle of a housing crisis, perhaps only a Fianna Fáil Minister for housing could even think of introducing a scheme that would inflate house prices and put money straight into the pockets of developers, while bullishly ignoring warnings from senior Government officials and experts.

The truth is the Taoiseach's price-inflating shared equity scheme was written and designed by property developers for property developers. When he is trying to make housing affordable, he should not allow developers to call the tune because their job is to maximise profit for themselves. The job of Government is to deliver affordable housing for ordinary citizens. However, it seems that, with Fianna Fáil back in charge of housing, property developers are back in control and ordinary people will literally pay the price for that.

If the Taoiseach persists with this lame duck scheme, home ownership will remain beyond the reach of those on modest incomes. I ask the Taoiseach to scrap this scheme.

Clearly, the Deputy is engaging in a propagandistic, sloganeering approach to housing. In the recent budget, the Government allocated unprecedented resources to a broad suite of measures to deal with the housing crisis. The largest social housing programme was budgeted for in 2021, in terms of public and social housing, including direct builds by approved housing bodies. Yet the Deputy has consistently ignored the largest budget in history that has been provided for housebuilding generally.

We had planned to build 9,500 social homes in 2021. That would be the biggest amount in the history of the State but clearly Covid-19 and the current lockdown will impact on that. We will try to recover ground as much as we can. Fianna Fáil has been in government for eight months and in that period, from the July stimulus on, we have made rapid progress in relation to housing, in terms of the Land Development Agency Bill, for example. We did real detailed work on that Bill, which will be an extra lever when it is passed, to give effect to the building of social and affordable housing. The Minister published the Affordable Housing Bill on 20 January. It delivers on the programme for Government commitment to putting affordability at the heart of the housing system.

Our only interest is in giving young people a chance to buy houses. If the Deputy takes last year as an example, the number of houses built was not sufficient to deal with the housing crisis. This kind of branding and references to developers and all that is political propaganda because at the moment we do not have the degree of activity that we should have, either in the private sector or in the public sector, which will pick up.

The voids programme alone was an immediate and effective piece of work we undertook from July with nearly 3,500 houses returned for people to access. That was evidence of a can-do approach to this. We will use all measures to improve and enhance affordability but also to get houses built. Ultimately, we need to get more houses built and that will take efforts in the private sector and in the public sector, through approved housing values, all the while focusing on the crisis of homelessness.

Sinn Féin has consistently opposed home ownership. It voted against our affordability motions and the help-to-buy scheme. It is now against the equity scheme before it has even been set up. It is nowhere near as dangerous as the Deputy is trying to indicate. Sinn Féin has voted against housing development motions 16 out of 21 times on Dublin City Council. It is time it got off the fence on those issues and started allowing housing schemes to begin. Do not allow ideology and politics to get in the way of houses getting built. Too much of that is going on in Dublin City Council and elsewhere in terms of significant projects that could allow for affordable housing right now, before any scheme, if they were allowed to develop. However, Sinn Féin has constantly opposed such schemes. It really undermines the credibility of the proposition made by the Deputy this morning.

My only interest and the interest of the Government is to get as many houses built as we possibly can. We know, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, that we should be building approximately 33,000 houses per annum to deal with demand and the crisis we have experienced for the last number of years regarding housing and in addition, to create the capacity for people to be able to afford to buy houses.

Sinn Féin is for public housing and affordable housing. We are very clear on that. The evidence of the Taoiseach's housing failures is there for all to see and is very real. It is not propaganda. The suffering and anger of workers, families and younger people, in particular, who cannot afford a home is real; it is not fiction.

The Government's proposed shared equity loan scheme will prop up unaffordable prices, line the pockets of developers and leave ordinary people out in the cold. That is the simple, plain fact of the matter. The Taoiseach can play whatever games he wishes but people know that housing policy has been a disaster on his watch in the past. We are watching now again while he makes more disastrous decisions in slow motion. Therefore, I ask him again to listen to the experts and to common sense, to ditch this lame duck scheme and do the right thing.

The Government will build a number of ladders in terms of creating opportunities for young people who are caught up in a rip-off rental market. We want to liberate young people from that scenario and give them opportunities to buy homes and be in a position to afford houses that will be built. The new equity scheme is targeted and aims to do that, along with the further proposal of a new affordable purchase scheme, with the State directly building affordable houses, and the retained and expanded help-to-buy scheme. A suite of measures is therefore in place. We also want to get people back on site putting bricks and mortar on the ground by tackling planning barriers and Irish Water connection delays. Additional capital money has gone into Irish Water, for example, to get sites ready. That whole infrastructure piece is very important in enabling houses to be built.

The housing crisis needs a broad range of measures to deal with and really get to grips with it comprehensively. Unfortunately, Covid-19 has intervened both last year and this year. The Deputy should be in no doubt, however, as to the Government's determination to do the right thing for people in terms of getting houses.