I wish all in the House a happy new year. The Minister and her Government are presiding over an abject failure on housing. This failure is devastating, particularly for those 13,514 people, including 4,000 children, who are in homelessness. That is a record figure and a shameful record. The housing crisis is also impacting on the hundreds of thousands of young adults living out of childhood bedrooms and the many thousands who are emigrating to Australia and other countries every year to find homes of their own. It is affecting thousands of people, including those I meet in my constituency every week, who are stuck in a rental poverty trap and cannot see themselves ever owning a home of their own.

The Government's housing failure is also affecting other policies and other services the State should and could be providing. We have a chronic shortage of teachers in our schools. We all know this. We have a chronic shortage of carers and educators in our childcare settings and there is a real difficulty recruiting medical staff for our hospitals. The reason in large part is that so many people cannot afford to live anywhere near their workplace or within a reasonable distance of it.

The abject failure in housing is also affecting other things. It is affecting our response to the humanitarian challenge we are facing because of the brutal war in Ukraine and the many wars and conflicts around the world which are forcing so many people to flee to our shores seeking refuge. We have always been a land of welcomes, from which so many of our own so-called unvetted males and females had to flee to find a better life in England, Australia, America and elsewhere. We know the Irish diaspora now exceeds our own population on this island by a factor of ten. Now that those seeking refuge from war or persecution are coming to our shores, we must offer a real welcome to them, just as we offer a welcome to those who come here to work and share their experience and expertise, the people who drive our buses, work in our hospitals and make our society better.

The reality is that across Ireland in the past two years, since that invasion of Ukraine began, our communities have offered a welcome to the many thousands of people who have fled here. Only in a small number of cases have we seen protests or opposition to new arrivals. I want to condemn outright the small number of very serious criminal actions we have seen committed, even in recent weeks in terms of arson, but also violence, intimidation, assault and threats. It is disappointing to see even Government party elected officials undermining the welcome effort. I am thinking of Mayo County Council's vote last night, for example.

The reality is that there is no refugee crisis. It is wrong to categorise it in that way. We do have a housing crisis and that is adding to the challenge of finding accommodation for our new arrivals. The Minister said it herself in response to the earlier question. The answer is that we do need to build more homes. The Minister said that. We need to increase the supply of our housing stock. We are hearing it from families living in hotel rooms, renters facing eviction and parents desperate to see their young people stay here and not move to Melbourne or Perth.

Why will the Government not take on the necessary ambition and urgency to deliver the homes the Minister acknowledges are so badly needed? Why will it not adopt the credible targets for delivery for housing we just heard the construction industry stakeholders calling for in the past week? We heard the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, calling for it. Why will the Government not adopt credible targets for the delivery of housing?

I thank the Deputy. The Housing for All target for this year is to build 33,450 new homes. I do accept there is a gap between the existing target and what is needed. In the past, we did not have the capacity to deliver, but that capacity is increasing all the time. We need to have an informed process in setting new targets. The Department of housing is working with the ESRI on research that will inform the national and geographical needs based on our population growth. We need to build more houses, but we need to build them in the right places.

The Taoiseach wants our targets to be ambitious and that is a good thing. The final figures for last year will probably show that approximately 33,000 new homes were built. That is the highest since the crash. Construction began on more than 3,400 homes last month alone, which is a 90% increase year on year. We are making substantial progress but, of course, we need to do more.

The Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, is working day and night, I have to say, when it comes to increasing housing supply and when he gets the research data, he will set out revised targets.

We are now seeing major housing developments all across the country. Planning permissions, commencements, mortgage approvements and all those indicators are all going in the right direction. A huge amount of work is being done to tackle vacant and derelict properties. We have the vacant home grant of up to €70,000. We know how extremely popular that is. I see this myself. Houses that have been derelict for years and years are now being transformed into new homes for young people and breathing new life into our towns and villages and into our rural areas as well. That grant is proving to be very popular. More and more people are looking at renovating existing homes, especially in the towns that have the services. It certainly makes sense to do that.

When we entered government in 2011, the problem was ghost estates and huge negative equity. As we all know, the sector was decimated. It has been built back up and there have been many challenges in the interim. We had the challenge of Brexit, Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and inflation. Last year alone, we saw the highest number of new builds since that crash.

Government policies are working. We need to do more, which I accept, and we will do more. As I said, our new targets will need to be based on data and population growth leading to more houses in the right places. The ESRI research is actually due out next month. The Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, will announce updated targets shortly after he receives that report. I have no doubt they will be ambitious.

No amount of spin can hide the reality, which is that we are just not building enough houses. The Minister's answer acknowledges that.

Construction industry stakeholders themselves point out that without credible targets, we simply will never meet the delivery we need to do for our growing population. We have heard it from across industry, with the Construction Industry Federation confirming over the weekend that there is capacity and a need for up to 60,000 new builds per year.

As I have been hearing from the Taoiseach for months that the Housing for All targets are too low and that they will be revised and updated, I am asking precisely when we will see the new revised targets and whether they will meet that clear level of need of need. This time last year, we in Labour called for 50,000 new builds per year. We also pointed out that we will need to see 50,000 deep retrofit and refurbishments a year to address that vacancy and dereliction crisis that the Minister mentions. Those figures have been borne out by reports from the ESRI, by calls from Sherry Fitzgerald and Dr. Ronan Lyons. How many times does the Government need to be told its targets are not credible currently and will never meet the existing level of need until we adopt credible targets and see a housing plan from the Government that is sufficiently ambitious and urgent to deliver the homes our people so badly need?

I thank the Deputy. We are exceeding our targets every year. Every year we are building more houses and we will continue to do that.

The Deputy acknowledges that capacity was a problem. That has been built up. Much work has gone into upskilling and retraining young people into the construction sector and it is working.

I stated clearly that the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, is expecting the ESRI research. The Department is expecting that report next month and updated targets will be brought to Government at that stage. No doubt they will be ambitious, because we have exceeded. However, there is no point in setting a target last year that is unrealistic. We set targets and have exceeded them. It is our intention to be ambitious because we all know we need more houses. That is what this Government is committed to doing, namely, providing more houses in order that people can have their own home that they want to buy and live in.