Since the cost of living crisis erupted and ordinary people face being crucified by energy and heating price hikes and rising accommodation and rental costs, we have sought to point out that this is not some natural phenomenon but that some people are benefiting from the misery and hardship that others are suffering. Last week we pointed out the enormous jump in profits for energy companies, electricity suppliers, oil companies and so on.

The latest evidence for the argument we are making, which the Government is determinedly ignoring, comes in the form of IRES REIT's accounts. It is the biggest landlord in the country, a property investment fund that saw its profits jump in 2021 by 15.8%, up to €67.5 million. Its investment properties grew by 6.7% up to €79.7 million. A figure I find really shocking is that its net rental income margin was 79%. The corporate landlords, the property investors, are absolutely creaming it on the back of the cost of living misery and absolutely obscene rents that are being charged to their tenants. We can just see it.

The daft.ie figures at the beginning of this month showed rents were up by 10.3% year on year for the last quarter. It had been 7% during the pandemic, already dramatic increases, rising as soon as the pandemic ends. In some parts of rural Ireland rents are up by as much as 22%. Average rents are now €1,524 a month. In south Dublin the average is €2,258 and across Dublin city it is €2,145. This leads directly to more people facing homelessness. During the pandemic when the Government was forced, under pressure, to introduce an eviction ban and a ban on further rent increases, the number of families and individuals in homeless accommodation dropped to about 7,000. It has steadily risen since those bans were lifted and is now up to 9,000. We do not have the figures yet for the beginning of 2020 but I can tell the House they are going to go up. We will be back towards the figure of 10,000 individuals and families who are homeless.

Will the Taoiseach finally do something about the profiteering and price gouging of landlords and introduce actual rent controls similar, for example, to those that have been introduced in the last two years in France, where they are now setting maximum reference rents above which landlords cannot go?

We have introduced rent restrictions in this country. I am just back from Berlin. The rent freeze there did not work at all; it had a completely dysfunctional impact on the market. We have to learn lessons. I read the daft.ie report. The fundamental point is that we need to build more houses. Building 20,000 houses a year is not enough. It is a very significant factor in where rents are. We have really to concentrate on getting houses built as fast as we possibly can. That means social and affordable houses and private development as well. Some of that will be private rental. The institutional funds represent about 7% of the rental market across the country, not the entirety of the market at all. As I have said repeatedly, of that 33,000 figure we expect 6,000 on an ongoing basis would be of a private rental nature but the bulk of it will be up to 10,000 social houses directly built through funding from the State through local authorities or approved social housing bodies. The biggest rent supports are through the housing assistance programme, HAP, and rental accommodation scheme, RAS, which are funded by the State and the taxpayer.

There is an enormous, unprecedented allocation of funding to get houses built in this country. Thankfully 31,000 homes were commenced in 2021, which really illustrates for the first time in quite a while that we are making progress. The pandemic and long lockdown did hit us and impact on construction and supply in 2020 and 2021 but we are catching up fast. The figure of 31,000 homes is the highest since 2008. We had about 20,400 completed in 2021 and the number of apartments completed increased by over 30%. We actually need that increase. We need a whole range of house and apartment types built if we are ever to get near the scale that we need to be at consistently over a ten-year period. There are times when I think people do not realise the scale of what is involved or the need to do what we have to do. About 46,000 homes were purchased in 2021, about 30% of which were bought by first-time buyers. There were nearly 40,000 planning permissions granted in the year to the third quarter of 2021. On the capacity of the industry, construction apprenticeship registrations in 2021 increased by over 40% compared to 2019. Employment in construction is back to pre-pandemic levels. Housing for All is working but it is going to take a number of years to get to where we want to be, unfortunately. Rent restrictions are in place; 2% or linked to the cost of living index.

Seriously, the Taoiseach's arguments are utterly threadbare. He mentioned HAP. I just told him rents in Dublin are over €2,000. The highest HAP payment anyone can get is €1,950. Someone looking for a HAP tenancy in a housing crisis might as well just walk up to the nearest homeless hostel. That is the reality of what is going on. The biggest fantasy the Taoiseach is peddling is that the Government is delivering additional social housing in any substantial numbers. In the first three quarters of last year, actual construction of new social housing by local authorities and approved housing bodies was 1,084 in the entire country. The Government is getting the rest from the same build-to-rent private developers who are creaming it and charging extortionate rents. They are not only charging extortionate rents to tenants; they are also crucifying the public coffers with the long-term leasing arrangements. The Government is not building the social housing.

The Taoiseach should just walk around Dublin, around my area, and look at all the cranes and apartment blocks. I guarantee him that virtually none of them is social housing. All the construction workers that should be building affordable and public housing on public land are actually building housing to make profits for property investors. That is why we have the housing crisis and the Taoiseach will do nothing about it.

The Deputy is wrong. The last number of housing projects that I opened were all social housing projects, completed. In the first quarter of last year we had a lockdown. The Deputy knows that. There was a full lockdown of construction.

Walk around the city. Check how many are public housing.

We are and we have introduced rent restrictions. We are going to develop cost rental houses also. In the rent pressure zones, we have capped rent increases at 2%.

Supply is the ultimate answer to this. We have to build houses of all types and we need all sectors involved in housing. The Deputy's problem is he does not believe the private sector should be involved at all. That is his ideological position. He is entitled to it-----

I just do not think the State should be facilitating its profiteering.

The Taoiseach's ideological position is responsible for the crisis.

-----but that will not guarantee housing at the scale we require. We need private builders to build houses. We need local authorities to build houses. They are doing so, and we have resourced them to do it. We need approved social housing bodies to build houses, and they are doing so to an increasing extent and to very high standards, as I have witnessed when opening a variety of schemes so far.

Zero council houses-----

We need to develop cost rental housing, which we are going to do, and continue to provide protections for renters, including in respect of indefinite duration.