The Government finally published its long overdue housing plan last week. After all the anticipation, what it delivered was nothing more than old milk in new bottles. There was nothing new on affordable homeownership, no clarity on what new powers the Land Development Agency will have and no ambition on social housing. It is just an open door for speculators and land hoarders. Worse again, the Government has abandoned annual targets for new home building. Could there be a more blatant admission of failure than that?

The Government has also essentially confessed to the locked-out generation that it has truly run out of ideas, simply telling them to hang in there while removing the very tools needed to measure progress. It does not take a genius to understand why. When you scrap metrics, you scrap accountability. Worst of all, the Taoiseach's Government has normalised the eviction of children, at a time more than 5,000 children are without a home. This a national disgrace and the Government's housing plan is a disgrace.

People can see the Government has no real plan for housing. It is forming policy on the hoof, so it is no wonder its policies do not work. Let us take its recent plans to rip up minimum apartment standards and gut planning rules less than a year after the then Minister for housing, Deputy O'Brien, passed what he called "a comprehensive planning law".

On a random Sunday last July, the Government leaked to the papers new plans to make homes smaller by drastically cutting planning standards. There is nothing wrong with trying new things and, indeed, each week the Labour Party and others urge the Government to change its housing policies, but not like this because the Government tried this move before and it was a disaster then. If we cast our minds back to 2018, the then Fine Gael housing Minister, Eoghan Murphy, introduced similar plans to reduce standards and a regulatory mess ensued. Indeed, it was a mess that forced one of his successors, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to amend apartment design rules again.

Why does the Government opt to repeat the mistakes of the past and, worse, to do more than merely repeating them? The current Minister for housing, Deputy Browne has sought to introduce a wrong-headed change without the required strategic environmental assessment.

Relaxing minimum housing standards was not in Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael's election manifestos last year That is no wonder because if it was, they would have spent the election campaign explaining why people should look for a return to shoe boxes and grotty bedsits. They would have faced the same critique they are getting now from the Irish Planning Institute. Instead of announcing it, the two parties kept it quiet and ran on falsely inflated home building projections.

When the Government leaked those plans on a Sunday last July, the Cabinet agreed it by the following Tuesday and councillors justifiably brought a legal challenge to its hasty change. The Government lashed out. The Taoiseach and the Tánaiste attacked me and the Labour Party's housing spokesperson, Deputy Conor Sheehan, and accused our party of weaponising the courts because our councillor, Darragh Moriarty, was one of the councillors involved.

The Government then backed down in the courts on Monday of this week. It was a dramatic climbdown. This was a significant development that shows that there is no strategy and that no strategy underlies this change. It was just an admission of failure. Does the Taoiseach admit that the Government's housing policies are failing, its attempt to reduce apartment standards has failed and its new housing plan is a further admission of failure?

When did the Deputy build houses?

Will Deputy Healy-Rae please sit down?

Sit down.

Will Deputy Healy-Rae resume his seat?

Will the Taoiseach wait until the circus is over?

I 100% reject Deputy Bacik's false narrative on the Government's position on housing and her vagueness about the Labour Party's position. I sum up the Labour Party's housing policy and the attitude of its members to housing as: whatever the Government proposes, we oppose.

That is not true.

It is extraordinary-----

Have the same discourse and respect.

----that the Deputy gave a big opening critique of overall Government policy and then zeroed in on apartment standards because her party opposes that decision. That is all the Labour Party can do. The Deputy told an untruth when she said that the Government has no social housing targets. She knows full well that the housing plan is very clear-----

That is not what I said.

She said private housing developers.

Deputy Bacik did say that. She said that we had no social housing plans. The housing plan states that we will deliver 12,000 new social homes every year over the lifetime of the plan. We have significantly transformed the scale and pace of social housing delivery over the past five years. That has to be acknowledged. I have looked at the Labour Party's manifesto on housing. It is so vague as to be unbelievable. It is bereft of any depth or substance. The Labour Party has put no flesh on the bone of any of its proposals.

The housing plan has depth and substance. We have capitalised the Land Development Agency to about €8.75 billion. We are talking about a €50 billion plan for housing. In terms of the need for 50,000 houses a year, we will need about €20 billion to be spent every year. The State will not to be able to spend €20 billion every year. The private sector has to be involved. The Labour Party has consistently been hostile to any private sector dimension to housing.

We say that the State will continue to allocate enormous sums to housing and to infrastructure that will enable housing, such as water services and the national grid. That is the fundamental big picture about housing.

The Deputy wants to get back down to apartment guidelines. We wanted to close the viability gap. We need more apartments built. We reduced the VAT on apartments in the budget. The Labour Party lazily and politically described it as a pro-developer measure. That is not the reason.

It is to narrow the viability gap that all the analysts have identified in terms of apartment building in cities. We have done a number of other measures in terms of the reform of rent pressure zones. The Deputy opposed that too, of course, because she just wants to be popular all the time. We are focused since we came into government on doing things around housing to reform the rental market. That is in line with the Housing Commission report, by the way, which called for reform of the rental market. We followed through on that in an evidence-based and informed way in terms of those who made recommendations to the Minister to come forward with proposals for the rental sector. I get the sense all the time that no matter what Government proposes, the Deputy will oppose it. We need different housing types and apartment types for different cohorts of the population who require accommodation and housing.

I reject the Taoiseach's misrepresentations of what I said. He is trying to construct a false narrative. Labour has always been constructive from Opposition. Indeed, we supported the Land Development Agency, just as we support the tenant in situ scheme. As the Taoiseach knows, in our manifesto we set out clear plans for housing to ramp up the Land Development Agency to deliver homes at scale and have a State-led approach, of course recognising a role for the private sector but recognising also that the State must take on a much larger role in delivery of homes. I notice the Taoiseach did not mention the revised apartment standards.

I did.

He did not acknowledge the considerable disquiet expressed by the Irish Planning Institute in July when he sought to bring them forward. He did not acknowledge that the institute said it was not convinced the announced changes would bring down development costs or accelerate housing delivery, just as Government's misjudged VAT cut is based on no evidence that there will be any closure of the viability gap or any increase in the building of apartments or the supply of homes that communities need. The Taoiseach knows this.

I do not.

His policies have failed.

Actually, no. People are saying the VAT cut will have an impact. The response from the market is quite clear that it is a significant step in narrowing the viability gap to get more apartments built. We gave the Land Development Agency its legislative underpinning-----

Which we supported.

-----and will further add to its role. We have capitalised the LDA very significantly. If you look at the mortgage drawdowns, for example, the percentage increase in first-time buyer mortgage drawdowns has increased significantly from about 23% in 2015 to about 35% today. We are making progress but affordability continues to be an issue. We have a growing population. If we keep on opposing everything-----

We are not.

That is what the Deputy is doing, come off it. If we are to hang around, no disrespect to anybody, waiting for this and that institute to get around to building houses, we will be waiting a long time. There has been too much of that in this country.

We need to build 50,000 to 60,000 per annum. We will not get there with Labour's policies.

What about the Government's climbdown on the apartment guidelines?