Saturday, 17 December is the day the new Taoiseach will be elected. The Cost of Living Coalition has called a demonstration outside the Dáil for that day. It is a very broad group of trade unions, students unions, disability groups, anti-poverty and housing groups and believes we do not need a new Taoiseach but a new Government. If there was not enough evidence of that need, we have had further evidence of it today with the Bank and Payments Federation Ireland, BPFI, report that shames this Government. It shows we have seen four and a half times the rate of increase in rents when compared with the rest of Europe. This has resulted in average rents in my area of €2,400 and average rents in Dublin of €2,200. These are totally unaffordable for a whole generation of young and working people, who are now being driven out of the country. On top of that, we had the Goodbody report last week that showed commencements of new-build apartments and houses have dropped very significantly in the last few months. I do not know how the Minister can say Housing for All is working. Apartment commencements have dropped by 29% and house commencements by 23%.

We got another report today from Citizens Information and the Disability Federation of Ireland showing that people with disabilities, mental health problems and other very ill and vulnerable people are not being given anything like appropriate housing. I raised last week how it is taking about a year for a person in my area to get a medical assessment of housing need. Very sick and vulnerable people are not being housed at all or are being put in utterly inappropriate conditions.

Against this background, it is beyond belief that at the end of this year, the Government will have underspent the housing budget by €700 million and it claims this is a success for the Housing for All plan. I got some figures from Mel Reynolds, the housing commentator, this week. I will put these to the Minister as questions he might wonder about the answers to. Does he know how many new council houses Dublin City Council built in the first half of this year? Guess.

It was zero. Does the Minister know how many new council houses Fingal County Council built in the first six months of this year?

That is not including AHBs.

It was zero. Does he know how many Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council built in the first six months of this year? Zero. Does he know how many South Dublin County Council built in the first six months of this year? Zero. Is the Minister serious in claiming his Government's plan is a success when it has failed to spend nearly €750 million against a housing crisis of this scale and when, in the epicentre of the housing crisis, the four Dublin local authorities built no new council houses?

Supply is increasing. That is a fact. The Government is focused, collectively, on implementing all strands of Housing for All. New public stock is not just delivered by our local authorities. It is also delivered by approved housing bodies and the LDA. The question is, when it comes to this House making decisions, which might be difficult ones where trade-offs are involved in our planning system, will the Deputy support the new consolidated planning Bill that will be brought before this House with a view to accelerating the delivery of the homes we all want and that he says he wants as well? Will he call on people to stop objecting to developments where appropriate developments are being proposed by local authorities, the LDA or the private sector? The Deputy is shaking his head but these are the relevant facts that really matter when it comes to getting construction sites under way all over the country.

Much has been said in the last ten or 15 minutes about the issue of targets, whether we are building enough homes and the extent to which the population has increased significantly. It is worth making the point that the targets in Housing for All were set on the basis of a housing need and demand assessment informed by the ESRI, which was engaged to undertake independent research. Since then the results of the census, at a headline level, have been published by the CSO. It is intended to review the underpinning research and update the tool when the full census data become available from the CSO next year. It should also be said that the preliminary census results for 2022 will show our population at 5.1 million, indicating that the population of Ireland and the consequent overall level of national housing demand is broadly in line with that projected by the ESRI for the same year. For people to say the targets in Housing for All are completely inaccurate and out of date is not backed up by the facts or the results of the census. When we have those full results, we will do a reassessment of what the revised projection should be to ensure the homes are delivered.

The issue we have to tackle here is ensuring there is sufficient capacity in the system, in our public system and across the private sector, to deliver the homes our people need all over Ireland. The Government is leading on this issue through a range of different initiatives. More public homes are being built than at any point in recent history. We have new affordable housing schemes that are now up and running. We have extended the help to buy scheme and we have brought in the first home shared equity scheme, through which transactions are now getting completed and people are purchasing homes which would not otherwise have been possible without the intervention and direct involvement of the State.

Planning permissions are not the issue in the housing crisis. We have 80,000 planning permissions granted at the moment. The problem is that those in the private sector have no interest in solving this crisis. Why would it when it can command record house prices and record rents? It has a vested interest in not solving the crisis because if there was lots of cheap accommodation it could not make such big profits. The Minister claims, against that background where the State has to intervene, with catastrophic market failure causing human misery for tens of thousands of people affected by this housing crisis, that public housing is ramping up. I just gave him the facts. In the first six months of 2022, in the teeth of this crisis, the four Dublin local authorities built no new council houses. The Government has failed to spend €700 million that was allocated for housing. What is the Government going to do about that? What is it going to do to ramp up the construction of local authority housing? What is it going to do with that €700 million? Will it, for example, purchase multi-unit complexes like Tathony House, St. Helen's Court, the buildings on Rathmines Road Lower, or other places where people face eviction?

Will it stop evictions happening while we face this emergency?

The time is up please, Deputy.

Will it control rents and make them affordable? Will it deliver public housing via our local authorities whose job it is to do so?

Yes, we will. Deputy Boyd Barrett should also put the full facts on the record when he talks about the performance of the local authorities in Dublin. The four Dublin local authorities currently have 2,000 homes under construction on various sites and in excess of 3,700 others in the pipeline for delivery at this point in time. Shanganagh is under way. The LDA is now building homes - public housing and affordable cost rental housing - for the first time through the direct involvement of the State.

For the first time in 15 years.

The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, is also providing €100 million to local authorities to help them clear legacy debt. This will assist in accelerating the delivery of social homes on sites that local authorities own by taking away the debt related to them. He is also putting in place a fund for the Housing Agency to assist it in assembling land banks around the country so that we can accelerate the delivery of public homes all over Ireland.