Inné, thug an Rialtas teachtaireacht shoiléir d’úinéirí tithe agus iad siúd atá ag iarraidh a bheith i mbun úinéireacht tithe. Sin é, nach bhfuil fáilte rompu anseo sa chathair ach go bhfuil fáilte mhór - céad míle fáilte - ón Rialtas roimh na creach-chistí a bheidh ag ceannach árasán i ndiaidh árasán sa chathair seo, agus níos faide ar shiúl, agus ag fágáil teaghlach agus daoine óga ar an trá fholamh.

The Minister led the Green Party into government saying that things would be different on housing, but, instead of changing things, he is helping to deliver more of the same. We certainly did not need a leak from Cabinet to tell us that Fine Gael objected to housing being a priority for this Government. We have known for many years that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were on the side of the vulture funds and the big developers.

Where is the Green Party in all this, however? There is no point voicing concerns at the Cabinet table and then waltzing in here and voting for the same bad policies about which the party is giving out. Last week, the party voted against cutting rents and banning increases for three years. Last night, it voted against stopping cuckoo funds from buying up apartments and squeezing families out of home ownership. The party has surrendered this city to international investors and consigned a generation, many of whom are young people who voted for its Deputies, to extortionate rents well into the future.

I want to share with the Minister some personal stories that have been sent to me by people caught up in this nightmare. Sarah wrote:

My daughter is paying enormous rent. She is still trying to save what she and her partner can pay for a down payment, both working, but the banks won't give them a big enough mortgage to buy anything decent. When they go after a house, it jumps up thousands in price. I feel so sorry for them. It seems hopeless.

Greg said:

My fiance is still at home in a house of ten and I live with my Mam who has a severe disability who has lost all of her benefits since I turned 23. We can't move out because of the crisis!

Anne said:

My son and his friends are all going to be 30 years of age this year and saving so hard to buy their own homes but every time they reach an amount in savings the price goes up again or again the houses are been bought by these vulture funds.

Stephen wrote:

I am on the housing list for ten years. Paying rent and have paid for 16 years sick. Im sick of it. I couldn't get a mortgage and yet have paid €97,000 in rent.

Finally, Amy summed up the feelings of an entire generation when she wrote:

There is no future for us young people. Trying to rent a house at a somewhat reasonable price is near impossible. Right now there are only 9 - bedroom houses in the whole of Cork priced at €1,000 per month or just under. I have been actively applying for somewhere to live with my boyfriend for the last 2 years and in total we have been given 4 viewings ... in 2 years?? How are we supposed to rent a place that's €1,400/€1,500 a month and try to save for a mortgage? It is impossible to look forward to having a future and raising our families here.

There we have it. I ask on behalf of those people why the Minister is accepting this. Why is he part of a Government that is shattering the hopes and ambitions of an entire generation with bad housing policies, which he knows damn well have put developers and investors first?

The Green Party is now up to its neck in this housing crisis. The Minister does not have to respond to me. Will he please respond to these people whose stories I shared with him, however, and tell them why he has adopted this position?

As a Member for Dublin Bay South, I know exactly what the Deputy is saying about the scale and depth of this crisis. It is without doubt an issue all over the country. It is at its most acute in the centre of Dublin, however.

I can see the dilemma in my own constituency, particularly for a new younger generation. We will not leave them behind, we will not leave them out, and we will do everything in our power to make sure they have the ability, as my own and previous generations did, including those in Dublin Bay South, to be able to afford a home.

We need to look after people of all means, incomes and needs, particularly those in inner cities. The current model is broken. The market is not working and it will not fix this. There has to be a radical change and we will help steer that change from within government.

We started by increasing this year's budget by 25% up to €3.3 billion, which I believe is a quarter of the entire capital budget. We will not stop there. We will need approximately €120 billion over the next ten years. That will not all come from the State but a large part of it will.

In the remaining time of this Government, I intend and expect to put this centre stage within government, as both the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have said, and apply the exact same rigour, urgency and flexibility that has been applied to the Covid-19 crisis to both the climate and housing crises. The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021 will be able to help us on climate. We need to put housing at centre stage and we need all Departments to act.

We increased this year's capital budget, which is the key and real measure of what we can build and do. We brought in a second measure, however. I recall in the previous Dáil, we were the first Opposition party that stood up and got cross-party agreement that we needed to switch to cost-rental housing as one of the ways to address this crisis.

In this year's budget, we acted and worked with the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to say let us make it happen and start straightaway with eight projects we can start building, which are not just theoretical or abstract, and where we are calling from the sidelines, but actually start delivering. That is only the start. The reason cost rental is such a part of the solution is that it is social and public housing. Rather than leased assets that go back to the private sector, the assets stay with our own public assets, on which we can build a long-term, sustainable financing model. It takes time.

We must be honest with our younger people that they and this housing issue are the first priority. The benefit of cost rental is that it is in the market. We can use public lands. We can actually bring down the rental price. That combined with affordable housing options, including the use of the serviced sites fund so that we actually reduce the cost, will be critical, particularly for urban areas.

This is not one versus the other. We particularly need to deliver on our national planning framework, which provides for high-quality homes and housing in urban areas, where people are there for life and have security of tenure. It is not that the rental sector does not count; it does. That applies to apartment ownership as well as renting. We need a variety of different solutions.

The key measures in the coming two months are the development of a new housing for all strategy that delivers on this, within which the Affordable Housing Bill 2021 will be key. We agreed with our Government colleagues the other day at Cabinet meetings that we would further look at amendments within the Bill to give us a range of options and flexibility and the ability to really create high-quality urban living.

Has the Minister not listened to the testimonies from those people that I read into the record? They are desperately looking for action and hope, and the action the Minister delivered in the past seven days, along with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, was to come in here and vote against banning rent increases and reducing rents. The action he delivered was voting against proposals Sinn Féin brought forward with regard to increasing the supply of social, affordable and cost-rental housing.

Last night, shamefully, the Green Party, which supposedly believes in urban living and apartment ownership, said to the vulture funds that it is a free-for-all and Dublin city is theirs. That is the effect of the Government's policies. Six out of every ten home completions last year were apartments and the Government has exempted the vulture funds from any minor increase in stamp duty.

How does the Minister put the Government's record over the past seven days with the statement that it will not leave people behind?

The Deputy is over time.

Perhaps the Minister does not realise it but he has abandoned this generation, just like Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have done for the past decade.

I listened to the Deputy. I hear those stories every day and they belong to every party, constituency and political viewpoint. They do not belong to any one person. These things are happening, in particular, in some of the areas where the prices are highest, including in my own constituency. I listen to what is happening and I heed it. It is our first priority to provide for our younger people every day.

I was about to mention, before the time was up to reply, some of the real and practical measures we need. We can all talk but what are we doing? The doing is about the State coming together to act. That sometimes involves difficult choices. I had to make a difficult decision a few weeks ago around the Digital Hub Development Agency. It is a huge agency with the most highly regarded and best people, with whom I have worked for 20 years. I have seen Thomas Street and James's Street not being developed in those decades. We looked at the situation and said it is time to act. It is time to set up the Land Development Agency. Let us work collectively on that. I think the Deputy and I would agree on the need for public action, public investment and development on public lands. We need more of all of those things and this can only be the start.

Thank you, Minister.

We will not give over this city. It does not belong to any investor or fund. It belongs to the people of this city and this country.

We are over time.

It is through our public land that we will deliver the housing we need.

I am moving on. I know it is difficult but I ask all Members for their co-operation and a little respect for all sides.

Can the Minister tell us what exactly is the Government's policy for apartment living? We know what the Green Party policy is supposed to be. It says it wants sustainable, high-quality developments that are located a 15-minute walk or cycle from a city centre. However, does it only want people to be able to rent this kind of housing, and rent in insecure tenancies? That is all that is available to people at the moment.

The Minister for Finance tells us apartments must be omitted from the meagre measures announced this week that purport to stop the bulk purchase of homes by cuckoo funds because they will not otherwise be built. Fine Gael has said something similar before. Back in 2017, when Eoghan Murphy was Minister, he said he had to reduce design standards because apartments were too high-spec and were costing too much to build. He slashed standards for every kind of apartment project but the changes he made for build-to-rent apartments were particularly damaging. There is no restriction on dwelling mix. The apartments are smaller and poorly ventilated at a time of a pandemic. There is a complete lack of storage space, no private outdoor space and they are not at all suited to working from home.

Mr. Murphy was pleased with himself when those changes were made. He claimed at the time he had single-handedly reduced the cost of delivering apartments by 15%. He should perhaps have been concerned that developers and cuckoo funds were also very pleased with themselves. Planning permissions in Dublin for apartments now vastly outstrip permissions for houses, and build-to-rent apartments comprise more than 70% of the permissions. These apartments are cheaper to build, more expensive to rent and impossible to buy, a description that summarises the Government's housing policy very well. Where are people who live in Dublin supposed to buy homes? They cannot buy the apartments that are currently under construction because practically every one of them is being purchased by funds. Eoghan Murphy's bright idea to slash costs for developers and cuckoo funds delivered for neither home buyers nor renters. All it did was boost developers' profits.

The Minister's party, we were told, entered Government to have a positive impact on environmental issues. I have some questions for him. Why are he and his party facilitating this planning bonanza for cuckoo funds? Does he accept that the Government is declaring Dublin city centre a no-go area for first-time buyers? Is it not the case that young people who want to live in a city centre cannot aspire to home ownership?

We have to make housing affordable. That is agreed and it is achieved by doing. There is a variety of different investments we have to make. We need to make significant investment in social housing at volume and at scale. That involves large numbers and huge amounts of money. The constraints in that regard are often not necessarily about the financing but getting the building workers with the training and skills, the blocklayers and so on. We need to avoid the costs going up so much that it is expensive for everyone to build. We need to do that so that we can build more. It is about what we agreed the other night in terms of changing the Part V rules to say it is not just 10% social housing but we also want affordable purchase and cost rental. That is significant. We need the affordable purchase provision and the likes of the serviced sites fund to help bring down the cost, working with the local authorities. The local authorities have a central role and we need to work with them on that.

The coming months will be critical because the strategy and the plan have to be changed. We need to change tack and do better. The funding has to go in that direction and we will use our influence in government in that regard. It is difficult because there are loads of funding requirements. We are going to have to fund health, including Sláintecare, education, climate and housing. It is a challenge to get the balance right but we will fund affordable purchase housing as well as social housing. I believe cost rental is critical because it fundamentally changes things. The two tiers we have in Irish housing are around whether it is social or private. The brilliant thing about cost rental is that it is between the two. It is in the market but it is public. I keep coming back to the Land Development Agency and the use of public land because I believe that is the key to help to unlock supply at scale. I am talking about real ambition. We are looking to influence, within the Government and with a cross-party approach, access to public lands.

Critical to this, and I have to mention it at every stage because it is crucial it is recognised, is that housing and public transport go together. To answer the Deputy's question about my vision for Dublin city, it is that we have a 15-minute city. It will be an accessible city with everything close by and high-quality cycling and walking facilities as well as public transport infrastructure. That needs to be funded. There is a huge funding requirement if we are to build the likes of the metro, BusConnects and DART+ for Cork, Galway and Limerick as well as Dublin. We need balanced regional development to make this work. It has to include our other cities. In the development of town centres, village centres and cities we need to go for compact development. Housing, transport and local environment are key.

We have a real role to offer and provide in terms of getting access to the land and getting an intervention on the sorts of measures I have mentioned. There will also be private developments and there will be build-to-rent provision. The €120 billion we need to spend on housing in the next ten years will not all be from the Government. If it were, we would not have the funding for transport, health and education.

Thank you, Minister.

We need that balance and mix. We will bring the mix towards affordable purchase and rental in particular because that is what we have been focused on in recent years.

There is very little reality in what the Minister is saying. It does not bear any relationship to the existing situation. He had an opportunity this week to do something about that and ensure there were controls introduced for all homes. The question is whether he regards apartments as homes. Is it his view that first-time buyers have a right to purchase apartments? At the moment, they cannot do so. There are no apartments at all in Dublin city centre available for first-time buyers. The Minister talks about incentives and subsidies for young people. That means nothing to young people living in Dublin because they cannot buy an apartment at the moment. They are all controlled by funds. The Minister and his party had an opportunity this week to do something about that and they failed to do so. They failed the young people of Dublin city in terms of their aspiration to purchase a home.

Thank you, Deputy.

Does the Minister accept that the aspiration of purchasing a home in Dublin city centre does not exist for young people?

We 100% stand up for the aspiration of purchasing apartments in our cities and right across the country. Apartments are part of city living and urban compact living. We 100% stand up for and support that and we did so in government this week. We got agreement with our colleagues that we will come back to this issue in the affordable housing Bill and look at further measures, as the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, has said, to deliver on that. It will be part of a mix because this needs a multifaceted response.

Absolutely central to that must be us having apartments as homes. We cannot have a system whereby a person rents and then when he or she grows up, as it were, he or she goes out and buys a house. We must create high-quality urban environments. That requires good planning and local council involvement. It is at local council level across the country that Green Party members are working with colleagues to deliver the planning we need to provide that high-quality local environment.

What of long-term leasing?

It is not just about the housing but also all the other services that come with that at the same time. That is what we as a party are good at.

He and his party are not doing it.