Ní aontaím in aon chor leis an Teachta as ucht an méid a dúirt sí. Níl aon amhras ach gurb é an t-ábhar is tábhachtaí agus is práinní sa tír seo ná cúrsaí tithíochta. An phríomhaidhm atá againn mar Rialtas ná níos mó tithe a chruthú agus é sin a dhéanamh chomh tapa agus is féidir linn. Is é sin bun agus barr pholasaithe an Rialtais. In the first instance, housing is the number one issue in this country. I made the following comment in the Oval Office in the White House. I said: "The number one issue in Ireland is housing". We have got to build more houses and we have got to build them faster to give the young people of Ireland an opportunity to buy a house or to afford to rent a house. It is a pity the Deputy did not quote that in respect of how I addressed the housing issue in a serious and substantive way when I was asked a question during the press conference in the Oval Office. I have consistently said, during previous Government and in this Government, that this is the number one issue. The Deputy will choose to play politics with it on an ongoing basis. She chose not to go to Washington D.C. That was a big mistake in my view. She chose not to face or meet people to discuss a whole range of issues she will habitually raise in this House, and did not have the courage or the guts to go to the US and meet her own interlocutors-----
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-----and discuss those issues with them. On the housing issue, if I could comment for a moment, there were several projections throughout 2024 in respect of completions. We have exceeded targets, particularly in 2022 and 2023. We exceeded Central Bank targets and other targets that suggested we would come in lower. That is the position. The first quarter of the following year is when the statistics come in. There are a variety of publications and data was published in September by the Central Bank and others, but the Central Bank had come in lower in previous years. The Deputy knows that EY-Euroconstruct and others were predicting far higher numbers. It was extremely disappointing that we did not make those targets in 2024. The overall Housing for All targets were exceeded in that three-year period, but that is not enough. We have to build more houses and we have to build them faster. The focus has to be on how we do that and how we get from 30,000-plus houses a year being built to 50,000 houses a year being built. I have yet to hear anything credible from the Deputy in respect of that challenge. When people make suggestions, as I have, in terms of the need for more private sector investment to go into housing, they get attacked in a knee-jerk fashion without any space or room for a meaningful or substantive debate on the issues or the modalities by which we can get 50,000 houses built a year. This is what the ESRI is saying we need in terms of demographic pressures. In other words, our population is increasing and more and more houses will need to be built. All the parties in this House agree on the demand side of the targets. I do not think there is big disagreement as to whether it is 50,000 or a variation of that which we require per annum over the next five years. We have a clear programme in terms of Government investment, which is the largest historically. We built more houses in the past three years than since the early 2000s. We built more social housing in the past three years. You would have to go back to the 1970s to get the same scale of social housing new builds in this country, as well as provision. We will continue to focus on that in terms of the delivery of social and affordable housing. We also need to get more private sector investment involved.
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I think that is pathetic. The Deputy accuses me of spoofing? Get off the stage. No one was sniggering at any housing problem. The Deputy knows that.
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It is pathetic - the protestation and the Deputy's attempt to exploit that particular moment, completely oblivious and refusing to reference the actual substance of what I said in terms of housing being the number one priority in Ireland. The Deputy can criticise our policies as a Government but she should not try to say she has a monopoly of concern or empathy on the housing question. Everybody in this House knows it through our own communities and the people we represent that this is the number one issue. No one will buy into Sinn Féin's propaganda, its feigned outrage and its feigned protestation. The bottom line is Sinn Féin did not go to Capitol Hill even though in other years it asked the Government of the day to advocate on its behalf, which we did-----
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-----on many an occasion for Sinn Féin, but when it comes to putting the party fist as opposed to the country first, Sinn Féin will always put the party first.
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That is why Deputy McDonald did not go to the US-----
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On spurious grounds, she did not go to the US.
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No one is convinced-----
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-----about your false assertions.
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I am always open to new ideas, to concrete and substantive ideas. I was not particularly impressed with what the Labour Party put forward in the general election campaign. Establishing a new national building agency would have only delayed things. It would take years to establish and it is a kind of rowing the clock back to earlier eras and to models that simply would not work now in terms of where we are with regard to house construction models, builders and so on. I do not see people in the construction sector flocking to be employees of a national building agency, not to mention the legislation that would be required to establish it, and so on. The Labour Party lacked conviction and even when I met Deputy Bacik afterwards in the context of formation of government talks, there was no fleshing out of its policies-----
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There was no clear blueprint, no paper in respect of how this agency was going to be established.
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If the Deputy has other ideas, that is fine, but they have to be focused on getting more houses built and getting them built faster, which I have said consistently over the last while. From about 2020 onwards about 130,000 new homes were built, which is more than anything in the previous decade or more. Momentum did switch. There was a turn and a significant shift in momentum in terms of house construction but given the population growth in this country, which has been quite significant over the last decade or a half, we need to build more homes and we need to build them faster. This Government is two months in office, essentially-----
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Two and a bit months-----
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It is two months in office, despite Deputies' best efforts. An extra €800 million on top of the outturn last year has been allocated to housing. There is €450 million for 3,000 new homes and also funding to fund substantial numbers of tenant in situ homes under that particular programme. The State's investment is enormous relative to historic norms in respect of housing in this country. That is why I am saying that parallel with that, there simply has to be a greater degree of private sector investment. If we look at the fall off last year, apartment block building is a huge area of concern. Deputy Bacik criticised the planning Act which took about three years to get through this House, despite all of the pre-legislative scrutiny and all the rest of it. It is the most substantive and important piece of legislation to enable us to streamline planning decisions and planning timelines through the new planning commission. As well as that, the national planning framework is key to zoning more land so that we can get more houses built more quickly. This is a very important piece of work that we will roll out. The Government will approve this very shortly.
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Obviously the county councils and the city councils will then have to adopt and change their plans to allow for more zoning to allow more houses to be constructed.
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I would appreciate if Deputy Bacik would send me a paper on the housing solidarity bond. It is a headline at the moment but if she can send me a paper on it we will examine it. Effectively, through the CREL initiative, for example, and the LDA has effectively been upfronting the financing of a lot of private sector housing. That is de facto what is happening right now through the LDA.
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There is an issue with the cost of financing but the State cannot be the first and last bank of resort in respect of house construction. Probably up to €7 billion and more this year is the totality of State spending on housing.
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Whatever way we look at it, we do have to look at the cost of financing and I have mentioned here that the commercial banks have to do more in respect of lending at sustainable rates to builders to build in the private sector. We will continue to focus on that work.
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As of now the State is already in the space of facilitating acting as a catalyst in terms of the private sector, with State underpinning essentially or back-up.
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The Deputy attacks because the target last year was not met. When the target was exceeded in 2022 and 2023, the Deputy's line was that the targets were not high enough. No matter what target gets set in here, the Deputy will always find a way to say that the Government is either not setting a target high enough, or if it exceeds it, it clearly did not set it high enough, and so forth. Now the Deputy wants me to set a target two months into the year again so that he can have another go at the setting of targets.
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My focus now, fundamentally, is to work on a whole set of policies that can get us more houses built faster for young people in particular, so that they can afford to either buy or rent homes. There is a range of issues we have to examine in that regard and continue to develop. As I said, we have already allocated an additional €800 million in respect of housing in the first two to three months of this Government, over and above what was allocated, to get more housing through. The Deputy referenced planning permissions. Planning permission was granted for about 32,000 new homes last year. That is 21% down on the previous year but interestingly, while there was about 3% of a reduction in houses, the big dip was in apartments - 39% in apartment permissions compared with the previous years. I have said in here from day one of this new Government that this is an issue which, collectively, has to be looked at. I said we have to work on methods and ways of getting the private sector involved, particularly in brownfield sites. Of course, what the Deputy and others did was just grab it and go off on a propaganda spin saying, "He is going to increase rents or do this and that", none of which I said. I never said any of it. It did not stop the Deputy from saying that is what I said. We need to look at it, and we need to look at how we create an investment climate that will draw in additional private sector investment to at least come up somewhere close to, and parallel with, what the State is investing in social housing. In 2023, planning permissions went up 21%. You are looking at a very high level in 2023; that came down significantly in 2024. Obviously, we want it to continue to go up. In the past five years alone, 119,000 first-time buyer mortgages have been drawn down. That is in the past five years to the end of 2024. Fundamentally, there has been far greater access to first-time homes and so on over the last number of years because of the significant increase, where we did go from 20,000 per annum in 2020 up to around 30,000-plus in 2022, 2023 and 2024. We need to get up much higher. We want to get to 41,000 this year. It is going to be very challenging; there is no easy answer to that, and again-----
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First of all, the 41,000 remains a target.
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Just on the issue-----
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I am answering it. I am going to answer-----
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On the data the Deputy is talking about, the Central Bank published the September figures-----
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Hold on a second-----
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Deputy Doherty is not answering the question. Sit down.
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I am not misleading the Dáil at all.
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Deputy Doherty did.
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The fundamental point I am making is that the figures the Deputy is making a big song and dance about were published, not by the Department of Finance, but by the Central Bank in September. The Deputy and I knew them, but we had other figures saying they would be higher. The Central Bank-----
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Deputy Doherty was not asking the question. It was the Social Democrats.
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The point I am trying to make to the Deputy is there were different estimates and so on about targets.
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The previous year, the Central Bank underestimated what we would increase by.
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In terms of the individual summaries Ministers get, many were referring to the Central Bank's reports.
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Others were referring to EUROCONSTRUCT-----
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The bottom line is this-----
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-----the only way you ultimately find out is in the first quarter of the following year.
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The first quarter of the following year, you get the data.
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In previous years, people said we would not reach our targets.
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We actually exceeded them. Some of the estimates, even from official circles, were wrong-----
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-----for the previous year. There was no-----
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I repeat this-----
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There was no attempt to knowingly mislead the people on any of this.
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We have worked extremely hard on the housing question. It is our number one priority. It will remain our number one priority.
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The focus has to be on how we get those numbers.
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I pay tribute to An Garda Síochána and its members for the outstanding work they do in a much more complex society than in previous decades in protecting our citizens and working with our citizens every day of every week. They do exceptional work. Our overall Garda workforce is larger than it has ever been. I know the Deputy slipped in the per capita number. It is the highest it has ever been. During Covid, with the closure of Templemore and so on, there was a subsequent delay in recruitment to An Garda Síochána. The latest recruitment campaign was hugely successful in that it attracted approximately 6,700 applications. Our objective is to get as many gardaí on the street as we can. The Minister for Justice, Deputy O'Callaghan, is working with the Garda Commissioner on that. If we take the Garda workforce in its entirety-----
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-----it is at approximately 18,000 as we speak. The budget was increased by €500 million last year. That is a 27% increase in the Garda budget since 2020. On another day, Deputy Tóibín will come in speaking about value for money, wasteful Government expenditure and all of that. No one can question the fact that very substantial resources have been allocated, far above what would normally be the annual increase in Government expenditure. We need to be conscious of that as well, particularly as we enter potentially more economically turbulent times. The Garda budget this year is €2.48 billion, which is a huge sum. We have increased the Garda training allowance to €354 per week. The age of entry has increased from 35 to 50. The mandatory retirement age has gone to 62. The Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, has continued his substantial discussions with the Commissioner about how we can further improve recruitment. The current capacity in Templemore is approximately 800 a year. The target is 5,000 over the next five years. We will have to increase training capacity to achieve that target and we are committed to doing that. A new group was established to achieve that and to make sure we can reach those figures. It has been formed and is finalising its report, which is expected in mid-2025, which will recommend a series of actions to take to enable us to get the increase of 5,000 that we require. All effort is being made to increase recruitment. Regarding deployment, the Deputy may be aware of the report today on public order policing. There is a substantial increase and expansion of capacity in that area, which is to be welcomed. There is much better resourcing of An Garda Síochána in that sphere over the past year or so. I am hopeful and have a better, more positive disposition than the Deputy has, obviously, about the future of An Garda Síochána and our capacity as a State to provide resources.
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There was a Garda Inspectorate report in respect of domestic abuse published earlier today. The Deputy has a habit of going back-----
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I mentioned a public order report. The Minister today updated the Cabinet on the progress we have made in terms of public order units, public order resources and a suite of improvements that have happened.
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They have.
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I will ask the Minister to brief the Deputy after the session on the progress that has been made.
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It has been significant, and so it should be.
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The Deputy mentioned the Dublin riots. Again, we should always be conscious that we are not alone in this. I and four of my Ministers met with the British Prime Minister the week before last at the annual summit. Events that are happening now are triggered by how certain people behave, outside the House, obviously, in terms of provocateurs or whatever. I refer to people who are determined to exploit certain situations in order to create riots, a very negative and violent reaction and so forth.
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The exact same thing happened in the United Kingdom, with, as the Deputy knows, a devastating impact on particular towns. We have to be very vigilant about that and we have to protect gardaí. One of the most important things that we are keen on doing is accessing legislation in terms of facial recognition and the use of modern technological techniques and capacity, which some of the House, of course, opposes. If we had that capacity, I think we would improve our responses to events like the Dublin rioting to make sure that people are prosecuted faster and held to account much faster than they were, perhaps, prior to this.
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