Niall Collins

The Social Democrats will never tell you where is the private investment going.

Well, what's not sustainable is uncertainty in the whole rental sector.

And when you have uncertainty, nobody is going to invest and people will exit the sector, landlords will exit the sector.

And when you have landlords exiting the sector, obviously you have less supply and that drives, obviously, the rent numbers up.

Well, what I accept is that we've had a major fundamental change in policy.

We've had to do it because the model was broken.

Rents were spiralling out of control prior to this in any event.

Well, what we're seeing now is that the supply is being ramped up.

The pipeline is delivering.

We had 36 in excess of 36,000 new housing units delivered last year.

That was an increase of 20% on the previous year.

We've seen the commencement notices for quarter one of 2026 were up 184%.

So that is very, very positive.

And that's how we fix this.

Well, it's important that, as I said previously, that we create the environment where the private sector will step in, will build more apartments, will build more private housing.

and enhance the supply that's available.

And equally, the state is playing its part in terms of social, affordable, cost rental, all the different mix of housing policy options that are available to people who need interventions.

And that's also allied with a mix of other supports that are available there in relation

to home dereliction and home vacancy grants to allow people to regenerate older properties.

So it's not about having one fix, but certainly getting the supply up there.