Go raibh maith agat. Yesterday, the Taoiseach said something quite extraordinary. He said the reason there is a struggle to spend the housing budget is because it is so large. He then said that the large budget, much of which is unspent, is evidence of a commitment to addressing the housing crisis. Therefore, the Government's failure to spend the housing budget is now being used as evidence of its dedication to resolving the housing crisis. How much longer can the Taoiseach keep trying to dress up failure as success? Does he really think anyone is buying this? This kind of bizarre and self-serving spin actually explains quite a lot about the Government's inability to deal with the housing disaster.

The Taoiseach is not alone in this. Pretty much every senior Minister in his Government repeatedly tells us that a record housing budget means the Government is serious about solving the housing crisis. We know that a whopping 25% of that budget, €1 billion, went unspent last year. Much of this underspend was in the capital allocation which was supposed to be spent on affordable housing. The failure to spend this budget is especially unforgivable when we know that a chronic lack of affordable supply is at the very heart of the housing disaster.

People on average incomes, many of whom are trapped in insecure tenancies and are paying extortionate rents, simply cannot afford to buy their own homes. The Threshold report, as published today, provides more evidence of this. Nearly 60% of renters are renting because they cannot afford to buy their own homes. After 12 years of Fine Gael in government, these people are increasingly losing hope that they will ever be able to afford a place of their own. They are relying on the Taoiseach's Government to meet its affordable housing targets but it is failing them. This is because those targets are not worth the paper they are written on and are being missed by a huge margin.

Last year, the Taoiseach's Government said that it would deliver 4,100 affordable homes but just 323 affordable purchase homes were actually delivered, in the midst of the worst housing disaster in the history of the State. This is pathetic. We know this Government is not short on money, so allocating large sums to housing is not difficult. What the Government is short on is a housing plan that will actually deliver for those at the coalface of the housing disaster. Is the Taoiseach worried about the failure to spend 25% of the housing budget last year? Is any analysis of the failure to spend such a large proportion of the budget being carried out? Does he expect the full housing budget to be spent this year?

I thank the Deputy for his questions. Context is important. The public want to know the full facts. It is fair enough to criticise the Government for the housing budget not having been spent fully last year. I do not think it is fair, though, not put this into context by saying the budget for housing was the largest ever last year and will be the largest ever again this year. The budget for housing has more than doubled in the past couple of years. This is an important contextual aspect and an important fact that should be acknowledged by anyone discussing this matter. I hope the Deputy agrees with this. It would be a very different scenario if the budget had been cut and we had been able to spend it all. Facts and context, therefore, are important. To talk about the budget being unspent without putting this into the context of the fact that it has increased massively does not give the full facts to the public. I think the public deserve the full facts.

If this were solely a matter of money, political will or care and compassion, the housing crisis would have been solved a long time ago because there is no lack of money, political will or care, concern and understanding from the Government. There are very real constraints to building new homes in Ireland. These range from planning objections to planning permissions to the availability of labour to the supply of materials. Notwithstanding these aspects, we built 30,000 new homes in Ireland last year and more new social housing than in any period since the 1970s. We will do as well, if not better, again this year.

We do not expect there to be an underspend this year and we are taking actions to ensure this will not be the case. For example, we are waiving development levies to bring down the cost of construction and the cost of building new housing. The tenant in situ scheme has funding for 1,500 homes to be bought from landlords to prevent people falling into homelessness. This initiative is going extremely well now. The Deputy will know that 250 purchases are in process in our county of Fingal alone. This means we will be able to increase the budget for this scheme and purchase more than the 1,500 homes we have funding for now. There has been a really strong take-up of grants to bring derelict buildings back into use and breathe life into them for new housing, particularly across rural housing, so we will provide more money for this scheme to ensure more homes can be brought back into use if needed. We can also provide money for the purchase of land because local authorities should be purchasing land for future social and affordable housing developments.

These are the actions we are taking. If we drill down into the underspend, we will see that it occurred for several reasons, but it was particularly down to local authorities not performing. Local authorities were provided with funding to build social and affordable housing but were unable to do so. This is precisely why we need to use a whole different set of actors when it comes to building housing. I refer to the local authorities, the Land Development Agency, affordable housing bodies and the private sector.

If we adopt the approach the Opposition advocates and rely entirely on the State and local authorities, fewer houses, not more, will be built.

The housing disaster is taking a wrecking ball to the lives of tens of thousands of people across the country. The Taoiseach's responsibility is not simply to stand up in the Dáil and announce notional billions in spending on housing and then blame local authorities for a lack of delivery. His responsibility is to make sure the budget is spent in order to deliver the homes people desperately need.

I will give the Taoiseach some context. After more than a decade of Fine Gael being in office, homelessness and rents are at record levels. The number of people in their 20s and 30s stuck in their childhood bedrooms is at record levels. Homeownership rates have fallen to their lowest level in more than 50 years, yet somehow the Government is incapable of spending the housing budget in the middle of this housing disaster. Instead, it is coming up with more and more schemes to ensure the housing budget is allocated in the forms of subsidies and handouts for developers. I again ask the Taoiseach how, in the middle of a housing disaster, he can possibly justify leaving so much money unspent in the housing budget. Has a proper analysis been carried out as to why this has happened?

I do not seek to justify it. I explained to the Deputy what the major cause was and what we are doing to make sure there is not a recurrence of it this year. I do not dispute any of the facts the Deputy put across, but they are not the full facts. As a party, the Social Democrats preach honest politics, but that requires context and the full facts.

Last year, 30,000 new homes were built, more than any year for a very long time. When my party came into office, only 7,000 new homes were being built. There has been a more than fourfold increase in new home building since my party came into office. Under this Government, more social housing was built last year than any year since the 1970s. The number of families in social housing today is 40,000 higher than it was when my party entered office. The percentage of households benefiting from social housing is higher than it was ten years ago. That totally demolishes the false claim that the Deputy and people like him often make, namely, that my party is opposed to social housing. In percentage terms or raw numbers - however one wants to look at it - it has gone up in the past ten years, not down.