The housing crisis continues, leaving workers, families and young people unable to put an affordable roof over their heads. Budget 2024 does nothing to change that reality. Housing affordability has been shredded on the Government's watch. The Simon Community Locked Out report published today shows that even with assistance payments, renting is completely unaffordable, while the latest CSO figures show house prices are still sky high and far beyond the reach of ordinary people. The housing crisis is now firmly embedded in rural Ireland, with soaring rents and evictions a common feature for families in towns and villages. Housing is the great failure of the Government. For 12 long years, Fine Gael has presided over this failure. When will the Taoiseach accept that the Government is getting it wrong?

I thank the Deputy. I do not agree with her remark. The budget contains a number of things that help on housing, such as extending and increasing the rent credit to help renters, extending help to buy to help people buy their first home and a budget of over €5 billion, meaning that we will build records amounts of public housing next year, including social and cost rental housing.

Today, the CSO released its new dwelling completion figures for quarter three of 2023. That shows the number of new homes built in the past three months is up 14% on last year, which means that the rolling yearly completions number is now running ahead of 31,000.

That is very encouraging. I am now increasingly confident that we will beat our housing target for this year. Where have we come from? When my party took office in 2011, only 7000 new homes were built. When I became Taoiseach for the first time in 2017, it was up to 14,000. It is now heading for 31,000 or 32,000. I wish we could do it faster, but that is a more than fourfold increase in the number of new homes being built every year.