My Labour Party colleagues and I have come from the funeral in Blackrock of our dear friend and colleague, the pioneering former Minister for Education, Niamh Bhreathnach. I acknowledge the presence at the funeral of not only the President but also a representative of the Taoiseach; the Minister, Deputy Foley; the Minister of State, Deputy Carroll MacNeill; and Deputy Devlin. I express on my behalf and that of the Labour Party our appreciation for that and we send our sincere thoughts, condolences and sympathies to Tom, Cliodhna, Macdara and all of Niamh’s friends and wider community. She has left a tremendous legacy and while we will have the opportunity to speak further on that at another date, I wanted to acknowledge it today.

In the past 24 hours, my office has heard from several individuals who have languished on the housing list for years wondering when, if ever, they will have somewhere to call home. We have heard from a constituent facing an imminent and illegal eviction who cannot get a response from the Residential Tenancies Board, from an employee forced to commute six hours per day from Mayo to Dublin due to the lack of affordable housing here and from a homelessness case worker who is re-evaluating their career due to burnout.

The Government’s over-reliance on the private sector for the supply of housing is a strategy that is failing all those people who have contacted me and is failing people across the country. In six years, Dublin City Council has spent €220 million buying back former local authority homes, according to Sharon McGowan’s report for The Times. The State funnels close to €1 billion into the pockets of private landlords each year through the housing assistance payment, HAP, and other rent subsidy schemes. That is a stark example of what we can call the sunk cost fallacy, this Government’s addiction to doling out public money to the private sector at the expense of spending that money on investment in State-built and State-owned housing. Why are we continuing to spend so much money subsidising private sector provision instead of building public housing on public land?

Week in and week out, we hear the same narrative with different figures and new initiatives from the Government. The reality is that none of those initiatives have delivered for the people who have contacted my office or who are contacting all of us all the time.

This week’s Housing for All progress report makes for depressing reading because its promises and aspirations jar with the reality of those contacting my office, and jar with repeated calls from organisations like Focus Ireland and Threshold and from front-line workers. We have seen seven years of strong economic growth wasted, when we should have seen investment in housing provision. The problem has got worse.

This evening the Dáil will debate a Labour Party motion to introduce real, substantial measures to deliver on housing, including an emergency public house-building programme, the extension of the eviction ban to the end of the year and the strengthening of the tenant in situ scheme. We ask for fast-tracking of our constructive legislative proposals: our homeless families Bill, our renters’ rights Bill and our Kenny report Bill. All of those, if adopted and enacted by the Government, could and would make a real difference in addressing the housing crisis.

I also pay my deepest sympathies to Niamh Bhreathnach’s family, colleagues in the Labour Party and friends. I had the pleasure of meeting her on a couple of occasions. She was a fine person who leaves a strong legacy in education and will be sorely missed. I thank the Deputy for her kind remarks on the attendance from Government. There will be an appropriate time to pay tributes to an outstanding Minister for Education. I ask the Deputy to please pass on the Government’s deepest sympathies to the family and to colleagues in the Labour Party.

On housing, we are acutely aware of the scale of the challenge the Government and country face in relation to increasing housing provision across the board in all tenures. We are not reliant on the private sector. The Deputy made one point which I think is wholly incorrect. I say this respectfully. She talks of €1 billion being funnelled into the pockets of private landlords. That is €1 billion that supports 60,000 tenancies, real families on housing assistance payments. People who continue to make the charge that it is a subsidy or cash bonus for private landlords are wholly incorrect. It supports 60,00 households in this country. We have seen over the past three years a reduction in the increase in HAP. We are seeing people transfer out of HAP. How do we do that? We need to build more public homes and more affordable homes.

If the Deputy saw the recently published progress report for Housing for All, she will also have seen that last year, under Housing for All, we far exceeded our target for overall delivery. Just short of 30,000 new homes were built. We will deliver more new-built social homes in 2022 then we have done in 50 years, since 1975. Those figures will be published shortly. We have provided cost rental for the first time ever to hundreds of tenancies and want to do thousands. That is State-backed affordable rental at below-market price. I have met many of the tenants who have moved in. It is a very popular new form of tenure. There is affordable purchase for the first time in 15 years led by local authorities. I have approved 42 schemes with 2,800 new homes across 15 counties. The first home scheme has seen over 900 approvals already, which is 900 new homes that families are able to buy. Many of them were renting and stuck in a rental trap. We have bridged the viability and affordability gap for them.

The measures we have taken are taking hold. Housing for All has been in place for only one year and there is much more to do in that space. We want to build more social homes and affordable homes this year, and will do so.

I thank the Minister for his kind words about Niamh Bhreathnach. We appreciate that very much.

We seek to be constructive in addressing the housing crisis and to put forward positive proposals for change that would deliver on housing. That is the purpose of our motion this evening and we were disappointed last night to see Government put down an amendment to that motion. We ask it to withdraw the amendment and work with us and all in opposition who seek to be constructive in this regard.

I accept the €900 million in rent subsidies is essential to keep families and households out of homelessness but it illustrates the short-sightedness of Government housing policy over the past seven years that that level of financing is not seen instead in the provision of public housing on public land, which would be an investment for the State and have a longer-term impact on keeping families and individuals out of homelessness.

Will the Minister address the fact that the number of people entering homelessness reached a record high of 11,632 in December? No matter what figures are given and what initiatives are announced, the housing policy is not working and we need to see innovative and constructive ways to address that. We seek to help the Government in doing that.

I have found the Labour Party to be constructive in many areas of the debate on housing. I welcome that and it contrasts greatly with some other parties on the Opposition benches.

The two parties who caused the housing crisis working together.

The Labour Party is in government now.

We have to acknowledge progress and we have to build the capacity to provide the homes we need. We set a target last year of 24,600 and exceeded it by over 5,000. We have a target this year of 29,000 and intend to exceed that too.

We are doing that by investing €4.5 billion in Exchequer moneys this year. I would compare that with the last time we had a Labour Party Minister with responsibility for housing in 2015, when €400 million was invested in housing-----

When the State was bankrupted by Fianna Fáil.

It is €4.5 billion now-----

-----and we are building social homes.

With regard to building public homes on public land, we capitalised the Land Development Agency, LDA. We passed the legislation to get that done. We have broken ground on the largest public site in decades at Shanganagh Castle. That is happening but we cannot turn this around in one year. We have made good progress in the first year of Housing for All, however. We intend to build on that this year and we will do so.