We persuaded 400,000 people.

Not on housing it is not.

I will happily do so.

Whenever you want, Taoiseach.

I will do so whenever the Taoiseach wants and in whatever forum.

And yet the Taoiseach is captured by them.

I thank the Labour Party for tabling this comprehensive motion and giving us an opportunity to discuss what is undoubtedly the most important issue facing our constituents today. We are fully supporting the motion. We have some differences of opinion on policy, particularly with respect to the future focus of the Land Development Agency, but we fully support and endorse the spirit of this motion. Obviously, we will be opposing the Government's proposed amendment. At the outset, I will say that I appreciate the line…

It has never been more difficult to be a renter. Rents are through the roof, and last year almost 20,000 eviction notices were issued to tenants. The single biggest cause of homelessness, as I am sure the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform knows, is evictions from the private rental sector. According to the Residential Tenancies Board, the average cost of a new rental is now €20,000 per year. It is €26,000 in some parts of the city and as much as €36,000 in others. New re…

The Minister is living in cloud-cuckoo-land. For the past number of weeks, there has been intensive lobbying on behalf of Irish Institutional Property, Property Industry Ireland and the Irish Property Owners Association all claiming, wrongly, in my view, that RPZs - as inadequate a protection as they are, they still provide form of protection - are the reason Government did not meet its targets last year. That is not true. The reason the Government did not meet its target of 33,000 new homes last year is because fo…

The Government could scrap RPZs tomorrow and allow landlords to reset rents between tenancies and market rent, but not a single new home would be built. How do we know? We know because that was the case a number of years ago. Institutional investors were investing in the market when RPZs were first introduced. It is ECB interest rate rises that have caused the problem. Given that renters are paying higher rents than ever before and have more insecure tenancies, the idea that this Government has their back is nonsen…

Will the Minister please confirm that the Government will not do anything that will increase the pressure on hard-pressed renters?

I ask the Minister to be clear to renters, not to me.

I join with other colleagues in thanking Tony and wishing him the very best in the future. I cannot think of any better job to prepare you for being a grandparent than being an usher in Leinster House and herding the bag of cats that is often the TDs in this place. We wish him all the very best. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. When it comes to housing, the seven threadbare pages of the programme for Government are the very definition of insani…

Hear, hear.

Hear, hear.

We did not lie to people.

We were honest with the electorate. We told the truth, Taoiseach.

Honest?

Nobody said that.

As the Taoiseach knows, the tenant in situ scheme is a vital homelessness prevention tool. It allows local authorities and approved housing bodies to purchase private rental properties where an eviction notice is in place and to turn the tenants into social or affordable renters. Correspondence I received from the Department in January confirmed that no new applications are allowed to proceed because the outgoing Government failed to agree targets for 2025. As a consequence, many landlords currently applying to hav…