Four out of ten first-time buyers needed family help to buy their homes in the first six months of this year, amounting to an estimated €210 million, and the typical first-time buyer needs a deposit of at least €52,000. My Labour Party colleague in Dún Laoghaire, Councillor Denis O'Callaghan, has been working on a co-operative housing proposal for ten years to deliver 42 homes on Loughlinstown Drive. It was to be delivered by Co-operative Housing Ireland, CHI, which had 34 social housing apartments. It also included eight three-bedroom homes that families in the Loughlinstown housing co-operative would receive. This important initiative has been going on for a long time. The land was disposed of by the council to CHI and the Loughlinstown group in 2018 but the developer pulled out last week.

The planning permission will lapse next spring and not alone will we lose 34 social houses, but eight families who have scraped and saved will lose their homes. I ask the Taoiseach to ask the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to intervene in this matter because we are very short on time.

It is very regrettable if the developer pulled out. I do not know the background to the case. I commend anybody involved on providing housing of this type in a co-operative context. I will engage with the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage and ask him to talk to the Deputy.

I think it can be saved.

I will ask the Minister to assess this and to see what we can do to help. I would make the point that I do take on board very seriously the report today. Mortgage lending is very robust at the moment and commencements, which are mentioned in that report, have increased very significantly. We are looking at approximately 31,000 commencements from October to October. While it is extraordinarily challenging, the help-to-buy scheme and the shared equity scheme and others will help first-time buyers. This is the highest number of commencements in a decade in any one 12 month period. There are signs of hope.