I will tell the Minister of State what madness is. It is repeating the same speech Ministers and Ministers of State have been making for the past ten years at a time it is blatantly evident that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael simply are not capable of dealing with the housing crisis. Many people chose to forget the two so-called opponents of Irish politics, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, were forced to drop the facade and coalesce in large part as a response to the public outcry in 2020 at the housing crisis and the failures of those parties to address it. Let us ask what has happened since. Let us compare December 2020 to where we are now. House prices have increased by almost 50%. Rents have increased year on year to levels that would have once been unimaginable and what did the two parties in government do, supported by rural Independents? They introduced legislation that will allow those rents to accelerate even faster. I do not need to remind the house that homelessness figures have increased time and time again. We recall at different points the outrages and the things that spurred communities across Ireland to action. One of those occasions was in 2021 when it was disclosed that an investment fund attempted to buy 135 of 170 homes on an estate in Maynooth. There was of course outrage that this could be happening and the commitment we received from Ministers then was that this would never happen as they would put a stop to it. They did not put a stop to it, just as they have not lived up to any of their targets and have not delivered the homes people need at prices they can afford. The motion is as simple as anything; it seeks to prevent investment funds from buying homes that should be available to Irish families in desperate need of them. Any Member who refuses to support that has no authority whatsoever to claim they are in any way interested in resolving the housing crisis.

Sentiment score: -0.09

Hear, hear.

Sentiment score: 0.00