A bit like the Obamas, there is apparently a rift at the heart of this marriage of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Ministers barely being seen together this week. The Tánaiste said earlier that process matters. Can he confirm, with regard to the Government's so-called housing tsar, that Mr. Brendan McDonagh is the Government's preferred candidate, as the Minister, Deputy Browne, said on the radio? Will Mr. McDonagh's appointment go through an appropriate public appointment process? Does the Tánaiste stand over this, and does he think this is an appropriate way to run Government? Will the salary amount to the purported €430,000? I think this amounts to a gouging of the taxpayer. I thought Fine Gael, in particular, was supposed to be a prudent guardian of the public purse.

I thank Deputy Sheehan and assure him the Government is getting along very well, and Ministers are active and busy in a whole range of areas. If there have not been sightings of different Ministers together - I will have to inquire into that - it is probably because they have been too busy doing their jobs. We are at one with regard to the need to establish a housing activation office. I very much welcome the plans brought forward by the Minister, Deputy Browne, this week to get that up and running. It derives from the Housing Commission and many proposals put forward by opposition TDs in advance of the last election to break down silos, second expertise and bring in utility companies. That is the decision, and the only decision the Government has made.

As the Taoiseach said in this House yesterday and as I will say today, there has been no decision made with regard to the staffing of that office yet. We will continue to engage on these matters, and that will be the next decision to be made.

The Minister, Deputy Browne, said Mr. McDonagh is the Government's preferred candidate.

He can bring forward his proposals and we will consider them.

The housing crisis is a social and economic disaster. Solving it requires an emergency response that is unprecedented in scale and a radical reset in policy. Yet, what we have seen so far from this Government is disarray, half-baked ideas, kite-flying and a complete lack of a joined-up approach. The proposed appointment of Mr. Brendan McDonagh, NAMA CEO, now appears to have been another ill-thought-out solo run by Fianna Fáil to add to the scrapping of rent caps and the tax breaks for investor funds. How can we have any confidence that this Government will co-ordinate a solution to the housing disaster, when it cannot even co-ordinate and take a joined-up approach in its own Cabinet?

To be clear, the Government's new activation office is only a fig leaf of what the Housing Commission proposed as a comprehensive, resourced executive. The Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Independent both report today that Mr. McDonagh was due to get a pay cut if he went back to the NTMA. In creating a housing tsar, has the Government created a golden parachute to keep him on his outrageously high salary? How does the Tánaiste think, on this International Workers' Day, low-income workers feel with the postponement of their living wage, while the Government creates gold-plated positions for insiders?

Nothing like that has happened at all. The Government has established a housing activation office. We would be delighted to constructively engage with the Deputy and all of the Opposition in terms of how this office can work effectively. We have all seen the need to break down silos, second people and bring in expertise. We should not be referring to people outside the House by their surnames and calling people tsars and all that sort of stuff. There are no such plans to create any tsar. There are plans to create offices, which will have to be staffed and populated. The Government will decide in due course, as we tease this through, how best to do that. All of this has to be about building more homes. The success or otherwise of the next five years will be in how we make progress in building more homes for more people in our country.