Varadkar says 400 people buying first home every week while acknowledging ownership has fallen

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said he acknowledges that home ownership has fallen in recent years but that around 400 people are buying their first home every week.

Mr Varadkar said there has been a “very significant uptick” in the number of people buying their first home, the highest since the Celtic Tiger period.

[ Census 2022: Average cost of rent in private sector increased by 37% between 2016 and 2022 ]

The Taoiseach was responding to Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns during Leaders’ Questions on Tuesday, who pointed to the latest Census figures which showed the rate of home ownership fell from nearly 70 per cent in 2016 to 66 per cent last year.

Ms Cairns said the inability to buy a home was not spread evenly among the population, and disproportionately affected people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who are “locked out of home ownership”.

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She said Fine Gael in Government had “done the opposite” to increasing home ownership. The Cork South-West TD said in 2006, the year before Mr Varadkar became a TD, the average age of a first-time buyer in Ireland was 29 while last year the average age of young people who finally managed to move out of their parents home was 28.

“We’ve gone from young people aspiring to home ownership, to people finding it increasingly difficult to even move out of their childhood bedrooms at the same age and yet you still claim with a straight face that Fine Gael is somehow the party of home ownership,” Ms Cairns told the Taoiseach.

“I don’t honestly know who you think you’re kidding, but I can tell you that people have had enough of that kind of spin. You’ve now been in office for 12 years, at what point do you think you will take some responsibility for the fact that your approach isn’t working?

“It’s difficult to know when you have yet to even acknowledge the fact that your approach isn’t working.”

The Social Democrats leader added that young people’s anger had now become “weariness”.

“They’ve witnessed so much failure and been so angry for so long that they are now weary and exhausted,” she said.

In response, Mr Vardakar said he acknowledged that home ownership had fallen over the period of the Census, between 2016 and 2022, and he wanted to get the figure “back up again” towards 70 per cent.

“I know of course that there is a generational divide, that many people in their 20s and 30s, even 40s are unable to purchase their own home at the moment,” he said.

“But we have seen over the last couple of months and bear in mind the Census was done last summer, we have seen ... a very major uptick in the number of people buying their first home.

“We see in and around 400 to 500 people every week now buying their first home and bear in mind that’s probably an underestimate because couples are counted as one when it comes to those figures.”

The Fine Gael leader added that housing prices in Dublin had been failing for “several months” and had peaked.

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said there were now 12,259 people homeless, “a shocking record number” while the number of families and children going into homelessness had increased last month.

Mr Boyd Barrett added the figure would escalate while landlords were refusing to interact with local authorities in relation to the tenant in situ scheme

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said the “sad reality” was that homelessness figures were “not even at their peak yet”.

“There is now a real risk that hundreds more children and their families will add to these heartbreaking figures in the course of this summer,” she said.