'DOUBLE-JOBBING HOUSING MINISTER' - Deputy Mary Lou McDonald- speech from 29 Apr 2025

Let's dive into the discussions shaping the nation. 430,000 euros. Taoiseach, that's the outrageous salary you propose to pay to your new housing czar. Nearly half a million euro, an astonishing amount of taxpayers' money for the salary of just one person. It's more than Taoiseach's very generous salary. It's even more than the President of the United States is paid. It's the starting salary of 11 new nurses or 11 new Gardaí or 13 new special needs assistants. And what's to be the role of this new highly paid czar? Well, from what we've heard, he will focus on removing roadblocks to housing construction, to getting houses built more quickly, to speeding up housing delivery. In other words, the main responsibilities of the Minister for Housing. A very expensive job share. Clearly, your government have no confidence in Minister James Brown to do his job. 430,000 euros. Taoiseach is a slap in the face for working people who are hit with rip-off bill after a rip-off bill and who struggled to make it to the end of the week. It's a kick in the teeth for those saving every spare cent, desperately trying to put together the deposit for a house. It's a kick in the teeth for every young person who has been forced to leave this country because they cannot afford a home. So how do you justify this extravagant gold-plated salary to those who are forced to fork out 2,000 euros on rent every month? To families who wait and wait and wait on council waiting lists for a home? How do you justify it to mothers and fathers forced into homelessness, raising their children in hotel rooms or hubs? The appointment of the housing czar changes nothing for them. That's the truth. This new cushy job is part and parcel of the same broken Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael policies that landed us in this mess in the first place. So as house prices, rents, homelessness all continue to rise and as your government misses its inadequate housing targets year after year, your next move, your next big idea is to appoint another bureaucrat on an eye-watering salary. It truly beggars belief. We've had the most expensive bike shed in the world, the million euro security hut, the nine million euro on phone pouches. So people already know that your government is a serial waster of public money. But I have to say this one really takes the biscuit. You've actually gone to the trouble of making up a job with a salary of 430 grand simply to give the appearance of government action when you're doing nothing at all except going round and round in circles. It's your clearest admission that this government has no new idea of substance or any real plan to fix housing. So now at all Fianna Fáil is Fine Gael a place soar a acrooch an job an arra tithiochta aeinaf agus caira caira caird trucae mila ura a eocleis, taa si a adwaal gus solair goil plan tithiochta an realtis in a frasoch. You see, you deliberately misled the electorate in November, you deliberately used false housing delivery figures to take the bad look off yourself and you did that brazenly and now you're at it again. Spinning, bluffing and taking people for fools as you spectacularly fail, you dream up this appointment. Taoiseach, can you confirm that your new housing czar will be paid 430,000 euros? Can you tell us how on earth you stand over this and can you tell us explain to us why you're recruiting a job share for your housing minister? First of all I couldn't disagree more with the deputy in terms of a critique of government housing policy. The bottom line is that if you look over the last four years there's been a very significant step change in the level and scale of housing delivery in this country. And if you take a loan on social housing close to 48,000 houses plus have been added to the social housing stock. 48,000 plus. Not since the 1970s have we seen that level and scale of social house building and social house provision. Those are the facts. We need to do far more than that but without question the figures and the number of social houses built in the last three to four years is without compare and you'd have to go back to the 1970s to get similar levels of social house completion. And if you look over the last and the first three years of housing for all 2022 2023 2024 the overall housing targets were exceeded. So it's not a kind of sort of just as you dismiss it all as all failure and failure. It's not. Those were the targets set by housing for all and they were exceeded over 130,000 houses constructed. Now we need to do much much more. The ESRI have said that the need in terms of population growth and so on is around 50,000 per annum. And you have failed in any shape or form to provide any substance underpinning housing policy in respect of how you would achieve that target, never mind the 30,000 plus houses that have been achieved on an annual basis over the last three years. Your policies were demonstrably anti-first-time buyer and there's been quite a significant drawdown up to 120,000 first-time buyer mortgages have been drawn down over the last number of years. Now if you had had your way you would have taken away the supports such as the help to buy scheme or indeed the bridge the gap scheme from those first-time buyers and you would have destroyed the momentum that has been built up over the last number of years in respect of first-time buyers. That is the reality in terms of that. You can smile all you like, W.A. Lockwood, but that is the truth. You wanted to get rid of the head-to-buy scheme, you wanted to get rid of the bridge-to-gap scheme, you please explain to first-time buyers how that would have assisted them because it would not in any shape or form. And we are going to maintain the focus in terms of both social housing, affordable, and in terms of our work with the Land Development Agency. Already this year, an additional £800 million has been allocated on top of the £6 billion for £50 million for the further £3,000 affordable and social homes and £325 million in respect of second-hand acquisitions incorporating the tenant-in-situ scheme and the provision for that. And since 2023 alone, over 3,300 homes have been acquired through second-hand acquisitions by local authorities across the country. And we have published the National Planning Framework since we came back into office, which will facilitate the zoning of a considerably greater degree of land. And I hope you will support that on local authorities across the country and get rid of your serial opposition to social housing that has been demonstrated time and time again. And also, in terms of the short-term Let's Heads of Bill has been brought to Cabinet and has been approved by Cabinet. In terms of the Housing Activation Office, a decision was taken today by Government to establish that office. No decision has been taken in terms of who will head that office, but to say this much, the person will be seconded from within the public service is an intention, which basically means there will be no additional cost in salary or whatever to housing or to anybody for that matter, in terms of a succulment within the public service. That's the objective, but no decision has been made. So I'm not confirming and I'm not in a position to confirm anything to you today in that respect. Deputy Macdonald. So you built less houses last year than the year before, and the indications are that you will fail to meet targets again this year and build less. Look, the evidence is there for all to see in growing costs and in the levels of homelessness, all of the evidence and data is there. But more importantly, the reality is lived every day, you see. So you can stand up and you can spoof, you can shout at me and point your finger, but you can't alter the reality of your failure, your abject failure, which astonishingly, you're attempting to dress up as success. If that's your idea of success, God help us, should we ever see something that you might deem to be a failure or an underperformance. I asked you three questions. I want you to confirm for us that this czar will be paid 430,000 euros. I don't care where they're seconded from. Is that the salary envisaged? I want you to explain how you stand over this. But more importantly, why are you double-jobbing your Minister for Housing? You have a full Cabinet Minister for Housing. Why is it that you have so little confidence? Perhaps you, in reality, agree with all of us, but neither he nor any of you are up to the task. Just to confirm that the Central Statistics Office published on Thursday, and you are good for giving your side of perspective all the time, did indicate that close to 6,000 new homes were completed in Q1 of 2025, which is the second highest Q1 delivery since the data series began in 2011, and a 2% increase in Q1 of 2024. It's a figure that you didn't, in any shape or form, refer to. Not surprisingly, because you didn't, in any shape or form, want to point to any figures that gave some degree of positive reality. Although we acknowledge that we want to build far more, and we have far more to build. And, I mean, you have a record yourself of opposing well over 1,000 houses in your own constituency. And you put your own constituency needs above and beyond the housing. You did! You objected to well over 1,000 houses in your constituency. And that, in my view, it's a bit rich for you to come in here on a daily basis, ranting on about housing, when your own record, in respect of giving it the ultimate priority that it deserves, is fairly poor in terms of your performance. And in terms of the programme for Government is clear in its decision, the programme for Government ordained that we would set up a Housing Activation Office, because we are going to consistently add to the initialists we've already taken in housing, and we make no apologies for doing further in terms of... Deputy Ivana Bachchik of the Labour Party. Like, share, and subscribe, and let us know your thoughts in the comments. We'd love to hear from you.