Following the revelation that there were only about 30,000 houses built last year – around 10,000 lower than the expected figure – there have been concerns raised about the Government’s ability to tackle the housing crisis.

Newstalk Breakfast presenter Ciara Kelly said it is “a madness” that “we’ve driven private investment out of the market”.

“I think we all kind of went, ‘What?’ when we discovered that instead of the 40,000 houses that we were told were being built last year there was only 30,000 houses,” she said.

“That was kind of a, ‘Oh God’, moment, and I don’t know that anything has changed that since.

“I do think that ideology has worked against providing housing supply – we should be squeezing supply left, right and from down the back of the couch.”

Housing Stock, © PA Archive/PA Images

According to Ciara, the framing of “framing people who come in and invest in our country as vultures because they are investing in property is a wrong thing to do”.

“You know, ‘Oh, we can’t have build-to-rent, that’s wrong, we can’t have co-living, that’s wrong’,” she said.

“If it doesn’t meet a kind of purist, hard left, sort of utopian idea... If it doesn’t meet those criteria, we shouldn’t build it."

“We should be building everything because certain people should be living in those types of accommodation and if they get out of the other types of accommodation that they’re currently living in, then it frees it up for other people.”

'Drift' in housing policy

Fellow presenter Shane Coleman said the Government “need to be singing off the same hymn sheet”.

“Micheál Martin, shortly after the Government was formed, came out and made a number of statements about housing, and he was contradicted by Simon Harris immediately,” he said.

Shane said he worries that there has been a “drift” in housing policy.

Main image: Ciara Kelly in the Newstalk studio (L) and houses (R).