Mary Fitzpatrick said that tackling the housing crisis is a huge challenge but that Fianna Fáil is a party of action on housing. With its Government partners, it introduced Housing for All to increase the supply and affordability of housing: “We’ve done that by supporting the delivery of private homes, social homes delivered by local authorities, approved housing bodies, and affordable homes”.

Politicians don’t build houses, Fitzpatrick said. They need to support the sector that does. She also mentioned the Help to Buy scheme, which she said is helping people to buy homes: “Have we done enough? Of course we haven’t. Do we need to do more? Yes, we do. And so what we need to do next is stop talking down the sector, stop talking down the incredible achievement that is being made, the fact that Ireland has twice the construction pace of any other European country, the fact that more people are buying their home in Ireland than in any other country in Europe. And we need to scale up, we need to build on what we’ve already achieved”.

Senator John Cummins said that when Fine Gael first took power in 2011, the building sector had collapsed and fewer than 7,000 units per year were being built. He contrasted this to last year, where 32,000 units were completed.
Cummins said some people have an ideological position that State delivery of homes is good and private delivery is bad: “My party believes that all housing units, delivered by whatever mechanism, have a positive impact”.

It would be a mistake in Fine Gael’s view to remove the Help to Buy and First Home schemes, as Cummins stated they have helped to bridge the gap to home ownership for many.

Many of the other speakers attacked the Government’s housing targets as too low, and Cummins said the Government would continue to review these: “But targets alone will not deliver supply. It’s about giving you and the sector certainty in relation to the schemes that have been introduced over the last six years so that you can plan in a stable environment in order to increase supply, which we all acknowledge is key”.

Green Party representative Francis Duffy said that we should be using more timber in our construction in Ireland, and lamented that we are behind Europe when it comes to embodied carbon targets. In terms of achievements of the Green Party while in Government, he said: “In negotiations, I would have fought for 100% public housing on public land. We legislated for that in Cork and Dublin. We tried to get Galway and Limerick, but that’s what we got. The LDA originally were looking to build 60% private housing on public land. We’ve changed that. So they’re now building 100% public housing on public land across the country, and they’ve come out and said they’re building 75% of that as cost rental”.

Duffy said the current Government has built more houses than the previous two. He said retrofitting numbers are up at around 50,000 units per year. He also noted that the Greens fought for the abolition of co-living. In the context of the Multi-Unit Development Act, Francis said the Green Party is advocating for reform of that.

Labour leader Ivana Bacik spoke about the chronic lack of housing that is affecting all generations, and said: “The Government’s Housing For All policy, launched with great fanfare three years ago, is patently not working to deliver the homes that people need”.

If in power, she said Labour would convert the Land Development Agency (LDA) into a State construction company to deliver homes at the scale needed. This construction company would be able to subcontract to the private sector. She said we need to be building 50,000 homes per year for ten years.

On the rental market, Bacik said we do not treat rental properties as homes but that we need to. If in power, Labour would give greater security to renters, implement a rent freeze, and provide quality of life measures such as the right to rent an unfurnished apartment.

Finally she said Labour would tackle what she called the “scourge of vacancy and dereliction” by introducing a greatly increased fund for those who wish to retrofit and refurbish.

Eoin Ó Broin said that Sinn Féin’s fully costed A Home of Your Own plan lays out what the party would do once in power. The plan is underpinned by three recommendations from the Report of the Housing Commission, he said. Firstly, that we need to build 300,000 homes over the next five years. Secondly, that 20% of the housing stock should be in State ownership. To do that, we need to double the amount of social/affordable homes that are built. Thirdly, there should be a reset of housing policy.

There should be at least a doubling of investment by the State in the delivery of social and affordable homes according to Sinn Féin. Ó Broin said that on the private side the viability gap keeps getting wider: “We have to stop intervening as a State at the end of the development process cycle and instead intervene at the start, do far more to assist to activate private residential development, particularly higher density development”.

On the private rental sector, Ó Broin said people are spending too long in it and that it needs to be smaller as a percentage of total housing stock, and much more stable.

Finally, Cian O’Callaghan of the Social Democrats spoke on the despair he sees among people in their 20s/30s about never being able to move out of their parents’ houses. Renters are also petrified of receiving a life-upending eviction notice, he said.

The Social Democrats have a fully costed affordable housing plan coming out soon, and O’Callaghan thanked the SCSI for the data it provides, which was helpful in costing this plan: “That plan will show how we could build thousands of affordable purchase and affordable rental homes each year to significantly increase supply”.

One idea O’Callaghan was keen to promote was affordable housing zoning, which is used elsewhere in Europe. He said there have been instances in the past where affordable housing was promised if land was rezoned for development but then it was not delivered: “An affordable housing zoning would be an effective measure to make sure that in certain instances when land gets rezoned, rather than someone getting a speculative uplift from that rezoning, that the price is kept more affordable”.

In the Q&A, the parties discussed and debated housing further, and the challenges to increasing supply and ensuring affordability. Ó Broin said that at the moment the market is unable to provide new homes at an affordable rate: “That’s not the criticism, that’s just the reality of the numbers as they stack up. And that’s why we set out in the housing plan a very ambitious public affordable housing programme, including affordable purchase, that essentially separates land costs and land values from construction costs, and sells the house at the price of construction”.

Cummins said that Fine Gael differs from Sinn Féin and other opposition parties in how you achieve affordability: “We believe that supporting people to purchase their own home, homes that they can own outright, not at the leasehold option as proposed by Sinn Fein, is the better proposition”.

Bacik said Labour agrees with many of the Government schemes but wants to see them scaled up. She also said the Government needs to increase its housing targets above the figure they are at now (33,000 units per year): “We know that’s far too low. The Housing Commission’s report has said it’s too low. Every other stakeholder and expert group has said it’s too low. And indeed, just last week the Central Bank expressed doubt that the Government would even meet those targets”.

Fitzpatrick praised the success of Housing for All since it was launched in 2021: “115,000 new homes have been built. And for every three homes that have been built, one home has been a social or affordable home. So that’s a demonstration that we as a country, we as a State, can actually deliver”.

Duffy said the Green Party had helped to change Part V so that more social and affordable homes could be built: “Now 20% of all housing units developed in the private sector have to be social and affordable”.

O’Callaghan spoke of expanding the not-for-profit sector, which would be crucial in hitting any increased housing targets: “If we’re going to reach the 60,000 homes that we need a year, a good bit of heavy lifting is going to have to be done by an expanded not-for-profit sector”.