I welcome young Olivia Nevin who is in the Gallery with her family. She is up from Cork for a birthday visit to Leinster House.

The number of children in homelessness is hurtling towards the 5,000 mark. This would represent a truly shameful new record. The tenant in situ scheme can no longer keep families in their homes because the Department of housing has starved it of cash. Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council have stopped operating it altogether. Vacancy and dereliction blight our communities, a grim visual symbol of the housing crisis. As we approach the Dáil recess, the Government’s end-of-term report on housing is a clear fail. The Taoiseach said it would ramp up to deliver 60,000 new homes per year and continue the tenant in situ scheme. He said the Government would update compulsory purchase laws to tackle dereliction and promised to protect renters from abusive practices and soaring rents but there is no sign of effective action on any of this. Fianna Fáil is the largest party in government. It holds the housing Ministry and the office of An Taoiseach, so it holds all the cards. Where is the change the Taoiseach committed to delivering? So far, his big ideas have amounted to him or the Minister for housing licking their fingers and sticking them in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. There is no evidence base for Government policies. Instead, we have seen texts to journalists, press releases issued and worrying about the consequences later, along with the ill-fated notion of a housing tsar and tax breaks for the same developers who conspired with the Taoiseach's party years ago to create this housing mess. The announcement on rent pressure laws actually necessitated emergency legislation to avoid a flood of evictions.

The Government's policies range from bewildering to certifiable. I will give an example. The Government claim to have passed a once-in-a-generation planning Act mere months ago but in our last sitting week before the recess, we are asked to amend that Act by the Minister for emergency legislation, as he might as well be called, before most of the big planning Act has even been commenced. It wants to reduce apartment sizes and remove the minimum 5% for community and cultural space. It denies this is being done at the behest of big developers. The Taoiseach has insisted that the change will reduce the cost of an apartment by between €50,000 and €100,000 but we have seen no evidence for this claim, just an internal summary of Land Development Agency research. At the housing committee, the Minister told my colleague, Deputy Sheehan, that the research would be published but he would not say when and the Bill is being rammed through the Dáil and Seanad this week. Yesterday, Deputy Sheehan asked the Taoiseach for the evidence there would be a reduction in the cost of apartments as a result of this change. The Taoiseach did not answer him either. We are not surprised there is no apparent evidence from Fianna Fáil because it has form on giving us dodgy, non-evidence-based policies like the overstatement of the number of homes built last year by nearly 10,000 units. I will ask the question again. Where is the evidence that reducing apartment sizes will make any substantial reduction in apartment prices for hard-pressed people who simply want a home of their own?

The fundamental difference between the Government and the Opposition is that we are action-focused and get things done on housing. I do not like to put this to the Deputy but I have seen nothing in the Labour Party's policy proposals on housing that would build anything extra. All the policy instincts of the Opposition is to oppose any measure the Government has introduced in the past six months. The same pattern happened in the past two or three years. I put the more fundamental point to the Deputy that if we want to get to 50,000 or 60,000 houses a year, we need about €20 billion, made up of public sector and private sector finance. No one on the Opposition side has come forward as to how to deal with that.

That is rubbish.

That is not true.

The Government is simply saying we are maintaining and increasing public investment in housing from the State, the largest actor in housing right now, while also creating the conditions to facilitate far greater private sector investment in house building and apartment building in particular, which needs to increase. The fundamental way to deal with housing is to increase supply significantly over the next number of years. We have gone from a situation pre-2020 when about 20,000 houses were being built per annum, which was too low, to about 33,000 now. We need to get to 50,000. That will not happen with tinkering or spending a year or two setting up a new State agency, as the Labour Party wants to do.

We do not want to set up a new State agency.

You do; you said it in your manifesto and you doubled down on it only last week.

You misread it.

If one looks at first-time buyers, for example, the percentage of first-time buyers has been steadily increasing, from about 25% of all purchases in 2015 to just under 40% in April 2025. Real progress has been made, through the help to buy scheme and first home scheme, in enabling first-time buyers to get into the market and get their first homes. About 119,000 first-time buyer mortgages were drawn down in the five years to the end of quarter 1 of 2025. In the first quarter of this year, there was an 8% year-on-year increase in first-time buyer drawdowns, at 5,308 for the period. That represents progress. In the past six months, an additional €700 million has been allocated, €325 million of which is for the tenant in situ scheme. That scheme needs to be targeted and focused on those in imminent danger of homelessness. It cannot become a mechanism to be deployed more generally for acquisitions, with a view to moving the emphasis in local authorities away from new builds to just acquisitions. We will allocate further funding for social housing to increase the record level of social housing we are already providing.

Thank you, Taoiseach. I call Deputy Bacik to respond.

I have not even started yet on the range of measures we have taken in the past number of months.

I am not hearing any acceptance of responsibility. The Taoiseach leads the Government. His party has the housing Ministry, and yet every time any of us in opposition raises the housing crisis with the Taoiseach, he seeks to deflect responsibility, putting it back on the Opposition and suggesting we have no policy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am very proud of the Labour Party's housing policy. The Taoiseach clearly has not read it if he thinks we want to set up an entirely new agency. Our policy is about ensuring there is a State-led approach to the necessary investment that will deliver the homes people need and to ramp up the Land Development Agency, which we supported, to a point where it has capacity to deliver.

That is what people want, and the Taoiseach is boasting about more people being able to get mortgage approval. I am hearing from families who are losing mortgage approval. They are losing it. It is running out because they cannot find homes to buy. There are simply not enough homes being built to meet the demand that is there. The tenant in situ scheme, which is supposed to save families from homelessness, is simply not working. Where is the radical reset and the Government approach, ambition and urgency needed to fix this housing crisis?

First, we do take responsibility. We are leading and have taken measures. The Deputy does not like the new planning design standards for apartments but that is addressing-----

Shoeboxes.

-----a viability gap. There will have to be a range of house and apartment types built. There will simply have to be to cater for different elements of the market. Some people have said outside of Government that this will be positive with regard to single people seeking housing and apartments also.

Developers will.

The single-stage approval process for all social housing projects under €200 million has been decided on by the Minister and also the RPZ reforms, which the Deputy opposed. That is an action the Government took that increased, by the way, protection nationally but that will also increase greater investment for the private sector.

To increase rents.

The Deputy just said, "No, no, no". Any measure designed to bring any private sector investment into the market the Deputy says "no" to.

And ramp up rents. Good man.

The Deputy does. She consistently says "no" to that. The review of the national planning framework-----

Thank you, Taoiseach. Time is up.

----enables us to zone more land and guess what? Some of you people will be out there opposing all of that too when it comes to the local authorities.