It is a fair question.

If anyone is politically point scoring, Deputy Ó Ríordáin is-----

The last time there was a Labour Party Minister in the Department with responsibility for housing, and, yes, I was around the table with him-----

-----400 social homes were built in this country-----

If the Opposition wishes to shout me down-----

They are terrified that potential voters might hear the facts. The last time there was a Labour Party Minister with responsibility for housing in this country-----

-----there were 400 social homes built in the State.

By the time Eoghan Murphy had finished in his role, we were up to around 5,000. The amount of social housing built in the State was doubled the last time I was Taoiseach.

Now, under the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, we are building more social housing than in any year in decades and we are going to build more again.

The Deputy simply cannot have it both ways. She cannot challenge me, my party and my coalition colleagues on our record and then lose the rag when somebody asks about hers.

If the Deputy is willing to criticise somebody else's record, then she must at least be able to defend her own record and she is not willing to do that. I think that is very disappointing but it is part of the Labour Party's crisis of confidence. It has lost confidence in itself and does not even know whether to be proud or ashamed of its last period in government.

Deputy Bacik's contention that it is our policy in some way to be over-reliant on the private sector again does not stand up. Last year, 30,000 new homes were built and more than one third of them were some form of public housing, whether that was social housing, cost rental, affordable or some other assistance from the State in some way. This is not the policy of a Government that seeks to be over-reliant on the private sector. We do, though, believe in private property and we do believe in homeownership. Sinn Féi…

I hope that the Labour Party will join with us, and will be the Labour Party of Deputy Brendan Howlin and former Deputy Eamon Gilmore in opposing Sinn Féin's attempt to take away these schemes from first-time buyers.

There is more to the State than the local authorities and councils. Even if we go back to the 1950s or the 1960s, the State used housing trusts and approved housing bodies to help to build social and public housing, for example the Iveagh Trust and many other schemes. There is nothing new about that. What the Deputy is trying to do is fit the figures himself and he is trying to say that the State-----

-----can only look to local authorities. The State is the public. The State is the taxpayer. What is funded by the taxpayer is done by the State. That includes local authorities, approved housing bodies that receive almost all of their money from the State and it includes Part V and the Land Development Agency. In addition, we help people to purchase their own homes in the private sector through the help-to-buy scheme, the first home scheme and other schemes that give them grants to bring derelict homes back into u…

I thank the Deputy. That is not the case. We want local authorities to build more. We want the approved housing bodies to build more. We want the Land Development Agency, LDA, to build more. We are not ideological about this. What we care about is not ideology but outcomes for people. We are interested in talking to anyone who can build housing for us. That includes local authorities and approved housing bodies, such as the Iveagh Trust, and the LDA. We are interested in talking to whoever can do it because we unde…

I thank the Deputy. Government funding for larger sports projects was previously provided on an ad hoc basis until the large scale sport infrastructure fund, LSSIF, was launched in 2018 to provide an open and transparent system. The LSSIF is designed to provide funding for larger sports facility projects where the amount being sought by applicants is greater than the funding available under the normal sports capital programme. Following a detailed assessment process, the first allocations under the LSSIF were annou…

We will certainly give that consideration. I think all of us in this House can agree that funding for sports and funding for sports capital is taxpayers' money really well spent. I am a former Minister for sport. I have seen in my constituency how sporting facilities have been transformed from the national sports campus to local clubs across Dublin 15 and Dublin 7. It benefits us in so many different ways. It creates local jobs in communities all over the country often for relatively small construction firms. It is…

This is still a matter under discussion in government. I think there is a place for facial recognition technology. At the moment the Garda needs to use enormous amounts of manpower looking back over old CCTV footage to try to identify people, identify perpetrators and help victims of crime. Using that technology makes considerable sense but there must be adequate safeguards because it is a new technology and it can be abused. It is still a matter under discussion in government. Certainly, before we make any proposa…

I thank the Deputy. The Consumer Protection Act is a matter for the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Coveney, but certainly when I was Minister, we examined and studied the history of price controls in Ireland and, indeed, those controls in other countries, and the difficulty which arises very often when one imposes price controls through consumer orders, where one can end up with a lack of supply and with shortages. That is a risk I believe everybody wants to avoid because while one can cap th…