Programme for Government Dail Éireann — 2026-02-04 ============================================================ Rory Hearne (SD), Dublin North-West The housing crisis is an absolute social catastrophe. I was contacted yesterday by a woman who is a civil servant, who is in her 50s and who has been evicted from her home into homelessness. What is the Government going to do about homelessness? In particular, what is it going to do about the delivery of social and affordable housing? Today the Social Democrats launched a detailed proposal for a State construction company. It is costed. We need a game changer. We need the public sector to deliver affordable housing, just like we do in health and education. Will the Government take this up and implement and create a State construction company that could guarantee the delivery of housing? We have young people who are tradespeople emigrating from this country because they do not see a future. We could be employing them in a public construction company, alongside the market, while guaranteeing the core delivery of social and affordable homes by the State, like this country did in the past. --- 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/2026-02-04/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:35+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-04