-----and the evidence is there in that the vast majority of house purchases-----

----in the country are by citizens and individuals. We have had the highest number of first-time buyers in years on an ongoing basis. What does that tell the Deputy? It tells us that affordability is improving-----

-----for quite a number of first-time buyers. We doubled the number of affordable homes this year and we will continue to increase the direct intervention by the State. This is not spin, because Housing for All is a fairly substantial document. It has been updated, and so forth and there are quarterly reports.

I have seen no other substantive document from any party saying how we are going to get to building 40,000 or 50,000 houses per annum. We can all pluck figures out of the air but we need an actual programme and clear policy platform as to how one gets more houses built-----

-----and how one gets more houses into the private rental market. I would suggest the Deputy's policies would take more houses out of the private rental market.

Which party is that?

There are different constituent parts to it.

Deputy Shanahan has an undue paranoia of Cork hurling.

No, I am not. Deputy Shanahan seems obsessed with senior hurling and Cork. We will park that for a moment. Since this Government came into office, there has been a very focused prioritisation and commitment to the south east on a whole range of investments. At different times when I have engaged with the Deputy, he has acknowledged that, particularly with regard to health. Then, every now and again, he goes back to the original script, which is one where he endeavours to portray the Government as not committed to W…

-----that in this Dáil, demonstrable and clear progress has been made on cardiac services and the cath lab, in addition to a wide range of other healthcare services and the broader economic developments in this area.

The extra staff have been appointed to the cath lab-----

-----and the hours extended. I did not give percentages to the Deputy. Over the five years, €89 million in addition to the base figure has been allocated. I gave the figures in respect of the staff, not percentages, when I said-----

-----that some 829 additional staff had been appointed-----

-----including 46 more consultants, 97 more non-consultant hospital doctors and 348 more nurses. I gave actual figures on real people who have been recruited to work in University Hospital Waterford, and rightly so. It is a great hospital, one of the better performing hospitals in the country.

We need to continue to resource the hospital and broaden services.

The Deputy knows that the elephant in the room, which he has not referenced, is clinical decision-making, national clinical standards and so on.

The Deputy knows the background of everything to do with the cath lab issue.

To be fair to the Minister of State, Deputy Mary Butler, she has fought for this tenaciously. I have to give her credit. It resulted in a second cath lab being put in place, the extension of the hours and the additional staff to staff it. We will keep at it.

As I said earlier, housing is the most important issue facing this country and our people. We have to focus on policies that will increase the number of houses we can build every year. This will also increase the number of houses that are available to the rental market. What the Deputy has put forward would, I suggest, depress the number of houses available to the rental market and lead to a decrease in the supply of houses more generally. For example, the Deputy is against the waiver of development levies. The com…

What I would say to Amy and her husband and Niamh and Anthony is that the Deputy's proposals would make the situation catastrophically worse.