Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-01-29 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire We do not need a single further unaffordable home, not a single one. What we need is affordable homes. I did not say they should all be social. I said they should all be affordable or social. The problem is that houses being delivered with rents of €3,500 or for €600,000 or €700,000 are totally unaffordable to ordinary people, but are very good for investors. We are saying we need a State construction company to deliver the infrastructure that the Tánaiste accepts the Government is not delivering, and to deliver social and affordable housing. We need a no-fault eviction ban so people do not get evicted through no fault of their own into emergency accommodation, including, increasingly, older and very vulnerable people. We need to stop the speculation and land hoarding. We need to stop dancing to the tune of investors in Zurich and so on in order to deliver the housing that we want. By the way, on my own personal record, for one of the developments we opposed, we said there should be more social and affordable housing because it was only getting 10%. We opposed it----- --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-29/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-29