For a considerable time People Before Profit has argued we need a State construction company in order to address the absolutely dire housing and homelessness crisis and to deliver the housing we need, and especially the social and affordable housing we need.

The evidence for that is manifold. The Government has not met its own social housing targets, nor its affordable housing targets. The national residential property price index today again confirms private developers and the private sector are still delivering housing that is getting ever more expensive. Prices were up 4% last year, this is the seventh month in a row that house prices have gone up, and they are now above Celtic tiger heights. Something I have mentioned a few times in the last few weeks is the private sector is not building family homes, that is, three- and four-bedroom homes, but are disproportionately building one- and two-bedroom ones because these maximise profits and this is contributing directly to the rise in child and family homelessness.

As if all that was not enough evidence, we have more today with Goodbody Stockbrokers - an unlikely source - confirming that private developers and private builders simply do not have the capacity to meet the housing requirements of the State. The report says the State's homebuilding sector has a "distinct lack of scale" and that "This lack of scale threatens the attainment of Ireland’s housing requirements". This was also recorded in an ESRI report at the beginning of this year that said we do not have enough construction workers to deliver on the State's housing requirements and we are probably 15,000 to 20,000 construction workers short of getting to the necessary levels of housing supply in order to begin to address the housing crisis. Goodbody elaborates on the point when it says that compared with England the top ten builders here are building a far lower proportion of the housing we need, that only five companies built more than 500 units last year and that the Irish building and construction sector is dominated by small-scale builders who are building on average 34 units per year.

We are simply not at the races in terms of delivering the scale of housing output and especially the social and affordable housing output we need to address the crisis. Do we not now have all the evidence we need that the State must have its own construction capacity? The private developers and builders are not capable of giving us the housing supply, and particularly the affordable and social housing supply, that we need to address the dire and urgent housing crisis.

I thank the Deputy. First of all, the State has a construction company and it is called the LDA. It was established in 2019. It got off to a slow start, but it is really getting going now. The Deputy will know Shanganagh in his constituency, where hundreds of social and affordable houses are being built. He likes to claim there is none in his constituency, but there are hundreds being built and they will be available quite soon for people to occupy. I certainly hope when people do live there that you will not have the brass neck to knock on their doors and look for their votes-----

And in Cualanor.

-----because the LDA is a body you voted against the establishment of.

You have some brass neck, but I will come back to that.

I have been sent a very long list by Deputy Carroll MacNeill just now, and indeed previously by Deputy Devlin, of all the developments in your own constituency you have objected to-----

There are a lot in here doing that.

Please.

-----on ideological grounds because-----

A lot of objectors in this House.

-----they are built by a private provider and they were one-beds and two-beds. However, if we look at the facts, look at the homelessness and look at the housing shortage, the areas we need the most new housing in are one-beds and two-beds. We need family homes as well, but the biggest shortage is for one-beds and two-beds, and these are the kinds of things Deputy Boyd Barrett and people who share his ideology seem to regularly object to.

We built over 30,000 new homes last year. That is up from 20,000 when I first became Taoiseach back in 2017 and up from 7,000 when my party got into office. We are scaling this up and doing so as fast as we possibly can. We are not willing to cut corners because we saw what happened in the past when that was done. It should not be a case of public versus private. If we try to fix the housing crisis with just the public sector we are putting one hand behind our backs. I understand the Deputy's position based on his politics and ideology - and he is entitled to his ideology - is that pretty much all houses, or the vast majority, should be built by the State. That is a mistake. We would build fewer and it would cost more. What we want is the public sector and the private sector working together.

He is right about the skills shortage. We know that is an issue. That is why the Minister, Deputy Harris, in particular, has led the charge on apprenticeships. We now have about 10,000 people becoming apprentices every year, which is pretty extraordinary. We have also changed the work permit and work visa system to allow more people with construction skills from outside the EU to come here. They are much-needed and they are very welcome. We are investing in modern methods of construction, MMC, so we can build homes much more quickly. The Deputy is welcome to come out to Church Fields in my constituency to see where Fingal County Council, a public body, is building hundreds of social and affordable homes using MMC.

I encourage councils that are not doing that to do it. The whole point of local government is autonomy. The latter allows councils to do different things. There are good examples of very good councils - of best-practice councils. I ask people to come to Fingal and see what a local authority, a public body, is doing in my constituency, using MMC and building hundreds of social and affordable houses. It is the same in the Deputy's constituency, in Shanganagh, which he always refuses to acknowledge.

You have some brass neck. I have been campaigning for Shanganagh-----

Objecting.

-----and for the development of public and affordable housing there for 17 years. It was Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil on the council that insisted that there would be some private development. It was People Before Profit that argued relentlessly that the entire development-----

I was not talking to you.

Will you stop shouting?

People Before Profit argued that the entire development should be social and affordable. We eventually won out against the resistance of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, but it has taken 17 years to finally deliver - they have still not been delivered - the social and affordable housing on that site. What we are saying is that we should supplement the lack of capacity in the private sector, so do not play at this either-or business. We are saying, and Goodbody is arguing, that private builders and developers do not have the capacity and that we need to ramp up our housing delivery and to deliver social and affordable housing, which your Government is failing to do. It missed its social targets, it missed its affordable targets and it is self-evident that the housing being built by the private sector is unaffordable. The average house price is €327,000; in my area it is €620,000. The average rent in Dún Laoghaire is now €2,400; in Dublin in general it is €2,200.

Thank you, Deputy. Your time is up.

This is not affordable. We need a State construction company to build up capacity, to build houses and to make those houses public and affordable.

You are a serial objector.

There is something I admire about the Deputy. I do mean this; I am not trying to be smart. Deputy Boyd Barrett is very articulate, very passionate and performs really well in this House.

And he is an objector.

It is really obvious, however, when you get angry - not just pretending to be angry-----

Shouting.

-----but genuinely angry - and the way you spoke to Deputy Carroll MacNeill there was-----

Because she was heckling.

No.

Because she was heckling.

You are heckling now.

Deputy Boyd Barrett, please, will you let the Taoiseach respond?

She was heckling. You do not like being heckled, do you, Taoiseach?

No, but-----

No. So why should she heckle me?

No, but I am in this House four or sometimes five hours a week. I am constantly heckled.

Not by me.

Sometimes by you.

Not by me.

Sometimes by you-----

Not by me.

-----just as you are doing now, and often by Members opposite, and I have never talked down to somebody, particularly a female Deputy across the way, like that and say "I am not listening to you".

She was heckling. I said I was not talking to her.

Deputy, please.

Again with your brass neck. Do you not see the irony of it? I am criticising you for talking down to Deputy Carroll MacNeill, for heckling her, and then you are heckling me.

No. She was heckling me, which is out of order.

A Cheann Comhairle, is the Deputy not out of order?

He is out of order, yes.

Thank you. The Deputy-----

Oh, but Deputy Carroll MacNeill was not out of order?

There are many Members out of order.

Ah.

Anyway, let us deal with the substantive issue now that we have dealt with the nonsense.

We cannot really because the Taoiseach is out of time.

We are out of time, a Thaoisigh.

What we need is more private and more public housing. The constraint does not relate to who owns the company; it relates to getting workers with the necessary skills and the materials. That is where the constraint lies.