Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Tuesday, 18 Apr 2023

Vol. 1036 No. 5

Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions

Deputy Mary Lou McDonald

The following are the words of Arklow teacher, Aoife Ní Chéileachair, who told her heartbreaking story to the media:

I am going to be evicted at the start of the last week of term. It's gotten to the point that I may not be able to take my job up next September because I have nowhere to live in the vicinity.

In a few short weeks, she faces eviction from the home she has rented for seven years. She has tried to find alternative rented accommodation and she has tried to buy a home but all to no avail. Aoife, a teacher with a raft of specialist qualifications, has nowhere to go and she has told her boss that she may have to leave her job as a result. She is not alone.

The Government's decision to remove the eviction ban has thrown thousands of renters to the wolves. It is a nightmare for the mother in Cork who fears her daughter will have to leave the autism spectrum disorder, ASD, unit in her national school because they cannot find alternative accommodation in the local area and for the family in Wicklow, with two children aged under five and a baby on the way in mid-May. They always paid their rent but in two weeks, they have to be out of the home they have rented for the past six years. That is the only home those children have known and it will be gone. It is also a nightmare for the young woman in Dublin who is being evicted from her home of two years. She has worked since the age of 16 and she has saved up a deposit but she cannot get a mortgage and she faces the prospect of moving back in with her parents.

The Government has created this catastrophe, having failed to spend more than €1 billion of funding for housing. Little wonder then that Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage figures released last night show that the Government's housing plan is in crisis. These figures reveal that Government missed its affordable housing targets last year by nearly 60%. Thousands of affordable homes that should have been built have not been built. This is an incredible failure by Government in the middle of the most serious housing emergency in the history of the State. It is why large numbers of working people cannot put an affordable and secure roof over their heads. It is why those facing eviction have nowhere to go. They ask where the urgency from Government is and where the affordable homes to buy or rent are.

When Deputy Varadkar returned as Taoiseach in December, he said housing was his priority but his Government's first major decision was to push thousands of working families, single people and pensioners towards homelessness. Tá na mílte teaghlach atá ag obair, daoine singil agus pinsinéirí ag déileáil le díshealbhú de bharr cinnidh an Rialtais. Coicís ar aghaidh agus fós níl aon phlean ag an Rialtas, agus fós ní féidir leis an Rialtas a rá le daoine cá bhfuil siad ceaptha dul. We are more than two weeks on from the Government's disastrous decision to lift the eviction ban. The Government's so-called safety nets do not make a lick of difference to people facing eviction in the here and now and it has no real plan to stop people losing the roofs over their heads. The Government still cannot answer the fundamental question of where people are meant to go. In the absence of a plan that works, the Government must reinstate the eviction ban until the end of January and then use the time it will buy to do what is necessary to protect renters.

The Taoiseach

Housing is my priority and is a priority for the whole of the Government. I can absolutely guarantee that. We appreciate that the country is in the middle of a very deep housing crisis, a housing emergency that affects people in lots of different ways, including younger people and not-so-young people struggling to buy their first home, people paying high rents and people who are experiencing homelessness. It affects people in all sorts of different ways. The numbers that were published yesterday show real progress. Some 20,000 families and households were provided with social housing of some form last year. Their housing needs are being met. Another 10,000 homes were added to the social housing stock, of which about 7,500 were new builds. We have not built that many new social homes in Ireland in any year since 1975. That is a huge achievement and one on which we intend to build. Compare that, for example, with the last year in which there was a Sinn Féin housing minister in Northern Ireland, when they built less than 2,000 new social houses. Compare the records of the ministers and there can be no doubt that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael housing ministers build more social housing than Sinn Féin ones, even adjusted for population. That is very clear now. That is a fact and it is one I do not think the Deputy can get away from.

On the temporary winter eviction ban, as I and the Government have always said, it was a temporary winter eviction ban. That is something that exists in quite a number of countries in Europe for the winter period. It ended, as we said it would, on 31 March. We believe Sinn Féin's proposal to extend it would make the situation worse. All that will happen is the number of notices of termination will build up and up and there will be fewer and fewer homes available. There will be then more people chasing fewer homes when the ban is ended. It is a policy that would make things worse. The Deputy may disagree and that is fine but that is our view and I think it is one that makes a lot of sense.

With regard to people who are facing losing their homes in the weeks and months ahead, to answer the Deputy's question as to where they will go, there are various solutions. I have answered this question every week now for five or six weeks. Different people face different circumstances and there is no one solution that fits all. One possibility, for example, is a new housing assistance payment, HAP, tenancy. Thousands of new HAP tenancies have been created so far this year. Another option is social housing. We are building more social housing a year than we have for a very long number of years now. Another option is the tenant in situ scheme, where local authorities will buy the house off the landlord. There are about 1,000 of those transactions or purchases now in progress, up from a very small number a few weeks ago. In some cases the cost-rental backstop is there. In the very rare number of cases where it is required, emergency accommodation is available as a backstop but not as a solution.

Deputy Mary Lou McDonald

The one thing that is absolutely clear is that the Government's failure to rise to the housing emergency is having real and devastating consequences for people's lives. The figures published reflect the fact that the Government missed its target on affordable housing by almost 60%. If the Taoiseach counts that as an achievement, or if he regards that as an acceptable level of performance, then God help us all. That is all I can say. I have given four examples. I mentioned Aoife Ní Chéileachair and told the Taoiseach about the mother in Cork, the family in Wicklow and the young woman in Dublin. We could go on and on. Despite the Taoiseach's glib response to me, the facts are that in each of these cases, these people have nowhere to go. The Government has not provided the safety net or the emergency mitigation they require. Those are the facts. The Taoiseach is clearly in a state of denial and it is a very dangerous type of denial. He seems to fail to grasp what is actually happening out there in the real world.

An Ceann Comhairle

Thank you, Deputy. Time is up.

Deputy Mary Lou McDonald

I ask the Taoiseach again to accept that this disaster is looming for these families and do the only quick thing he can do, which is to reinstate the eviction ban and, for God's sake, buy the time the Government clearly needs to get this right and protect these families.

Deputies

Hear, hear.

The Taoiseach

I will tell the Deputy what is happening in the real world. Last year, about 30,000 new homes were built in Ireland. In those homes are real people, with 30,000 families living in a home that did not exist last year. It is the kind of house-building we have not seen in this country in a very long time and we are going to build on that. Last year, more new social housing was provided than in any year in decades - something Sinn Féin was not able to achieve in Northern Ireland when it was given the chance and held the housing ministry. Thousands of families are in social housing tonight in houses that did not exist a year ago.

There will be more of them this year and I can guarantee the Deputy that.

The thing that gives me the most hope, and the greatest sense that we are starting to make progress here, is the very big increase in the number of first-time buyers. There are approximately 400 people per week now buying their first home. That does not include own builds and it counts couples as just one. If anything, that is an underestimate. We are seeing hundreds of first-time buyers now every week. This is very clear and indisputable at this stage. It is only a question of whether this is the highest since 2010 or the highest since 2007. Sinn Féin wants to reverse that. The motion it has tabled in the Dáil this week would end the help to buy and first home schemes. It has gaslighted young people and first-time buyers into thinking that it is on their side; it is not. It will take away the schemes that are working. It wants to take away help to buy, first home-----

Deputy Matt Carthy

Buy the actual homes.

The Taoiseach

----and that is why I will oppose its motion this week.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

Is mór an náire líon na ndaoine sa tír seo atá gan dídean. Níl tithe á dtógáil agus tá an ghéarchéim tithíochta ag dul in olcas. In the face of a worsening housing crisis, yesterday saw more evidence of the Government's failed policies on housing. Let us remind ourselves that last year, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy O'Brien, committed to delivering 9,000 new-build social homes and 4,000 affordable homes. However, yesterday it emerged that the Government has delivered just a fraction of those targets in 2022. It has missed targets on both social and affordable new builds. Frankly, this news comes as no surprise, given that we have learned that €1.5 billion of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage's capital budget was underspent between 2020 and 2022. More than €1 billion of that figure was intended for the delivery of social and affordable homes.

The Oireachtas has returned today after a two-week break. I urge the Taoiseach to put the urgent resolution of the housing crisis at the centre of his focus now. Upon taking office, he set high expectations that substantial progress on housing would be made swiftly but since then, we have seen the same old stale policies repackaged and spun again and again. Indeed, the first sentence of yesterday's Government press release goes as far as to welcome what is, in fact, a failure of delivery and a failure to meet targets. The Government welcomed that failure to meet its own targets, which themselves have been accepted as being much too low, according to the Housing Commission. While we are all familiar with the phrase "running to stand still", homelessness figures are at a record high of 11,742 people while the Government is missing targets that fall short of what is needed. It is neither running nor going anywhere fast. We know the housing crisis is getting worse, not better, and that the unforgivable decision to lift the eviction ban, based on no data and with no contingency plan in place, is going to make things worse for so many.

We know from the Residential Tenancies Board that more than 9,000 notices to quit were issued in the second half of last year. The Taoiseach said that leaving the ban in place would have made things worse but he has presented us with no evidence for that. We tabled parliamentary questions and FOI requests; we cannot get any data from the Government. Meanwhile, I am hearing from families in my own constituency who now have no choice but to overhold given that they have received a notice to quit and have nowhere else to go. I am hearing from pensioners who are facing eviction after years of renting the same home. Again, they have nowhere else to go. We are hearing from teachers' unions such as the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, INTO, which are faced with an exodus of teachers from the education system because the teachers cannot afford anywhere to live near their schools. This same exodus is depriving our society and our communities of much-needed highly skilled workers in healthcare, education and construction itself. Young people are being pushed out of cities after receiving eviction notices while unscrupulous landlords are putting their homes up for short-term rental on Airbnb and other platforms. Does the Taoiseach accept that the Government is out of its depth on housing, that it is simply not meeting the needs of our families and our communities and that the eviction ban decision has made matter worse?

The Taoiseach

No, I do not accept that. We are making real progress and we need to build on the progress that has been made to date. These are ambitious targets. Let us not forget that we met our key target to build more new homes of different types last year. We built roughly 30,000 new homes in Ireland last year, exceeding our target. It should be borne in mind that this does not include student accommodation or derelict homes being brought back into use. We exceeded that target last year and we are working towards meeting it again this year as well.

In terms of social housing, 7,500 new homes were built last year by local authorities, approved housing bodies, AHBs, and through Part V. That is the highest number in decades. It is a significant achievement. Does the Deputy perhaps know how many social homes were built the last time there was a Labour Party Minister with responsibility for housing?

Deputy Ivana Bacik

That is-----

Deputy Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

-----unbelievable.

(Interruptions).

The Taoiseach

It is a fair question.

(Interruptions).

Deputy Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

This is about homes and the Taoiseach is point scoring.

An Ceann Comhairle

Deputy Ó Ríordáin, please.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

That is all he ever does.

(Interruptions).

An Ceann Comhairle

Let the Taoiseach respond.

The Taoiseach

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

(Interruptions).

The Taoiseach

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-----

Deputy Sean Sherlock

You were.

The Taoiseach

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

(Interruptions).

Deputy Mattie McGrath

Were they even finished?

Deputy Michael Healy-Rae

Shame upon you.

(Interruptions).

The Taoiseach

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

(Interruptions).

The Taoiseach

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-----

(Interruptions).

Deputy Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

All you have-----

The Taoiseach

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

(Interruptions).

The Taoiseach

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.

(Interruptions).

The 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.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

Frankly, the Taoiseach has reached a new low with his attempt-----

(Interruptions).

Deputy Heather Humphreys

You can give it but you cannot take it.

Deputy Michael Healy-Rae

It is a fact.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

The Taoiseach has reached a new low. That was a ridiculous attempt at political point scoring in the face of the brutal facts-----

(Interruptions).

Deputy Ivana Bacik

It is all very well smirking and being smug and self-congratulatory, but that is not the help that families in the country need-----

Deputy Jennifer Carroll MacNeill

The Deputy-----

Deputy Ivana Bacik

Public representatives from the Government and Opposition parties have nowhere to tell people to go because there are no homes available in our communities. There are no affordable homes, no homes for rent and no homes for sale. This is the failure of the Taoiseach's Government. It is a testament to the failed policies of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and of their over-reliance on a private sector and on a market that has patently failed to deliver the homes needed, which the Taoiseach himself has acknowledged. He has acknowledged a current shortfall of 250,000 homes. The Housing Commission has identified the Government's targets as being far too low. The targets it should be setting are closer to 50,000 and 60,000 homes being built per year. Yet all the Taoiseach does is to castigate Opposition parties that are putting forward sensible, ambitious and rational proposals for housing and for delivery of homes that are needed. It is just not good enough to attempt to politically point score-----

An Ceann Comhairle

I thank the Deputy.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

-----when the Taoiseach's own Government colleagues, let us not forget, in Fianna Fáil, were the party which crashed the economy in the 2007-11 Government. Let us not forget that. We have had seven years of prosperity since 2016, but-----

An Ceann Comhairle

The time is up, Deputy.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

-----the Taoiseach's party and Fianna Fáil have patently failed to deliver the infrastructure we need, particularly the houses our communities need.

The Taoiseach

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.

Deputy Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

The Taoiseach needs a history lesson.

(Interruptions).

The Taoiseach

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 Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

The Taoiseach cannot-----

Deputy Ivana Bacik

The Taoiseach has lost the rag.

The Taoiseach

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 Féin has a motion in the Dáil this week to abolish the help to buy and first home schemes. These are schemes that are helping thousands of young people and young couples to get their feet on the property ladder and to buy their first homes.

An Ceann Comhairle

I thank the Taoiseach.

The Taoiseach

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.

Deputy Mary Lou McDonald

The Taoiseach was castigating them for not-----

An Ceann Comhairle

Please, Deputy. I call Deputy Boyd Barrett.

Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett

No doubt the Taoiseach hoped the Easter break would give him a bit of respite from the rage and despair people are feeling concerning the cruel and stupid decision his Government made to lift the eviction ban. This issue is not going to go away for thousands and thousands of families and individuals.

They are facing notices to quit, they are facing eviction and they have nowhere to go. No social housing is available for them. There is no affordable rental available for them. There is no affordable purchase available for the vast majority of them.

At the time, the Taoiseach justified this cruel decision and trumpeted the fact that during the period of the ban there had been a dramatic increase in the delivery of social housing at the end of 2022. Now, however, we have the facts and the facts do not suggest that the Government used the period of the eviction ban to improve things in any significant way. The facts show an absolute abject failure on the part of the Government to deliver even on its own targets of social housing or on affordable housing. The Government is 1,500 short of its own target on social housing and 3,000 short on its target for affordable housing.

The Government then continues to recycle the spin. We need to call the Taoiseach out on this. He said that "we" built 30,000 houses last year - "we" - and that "we" built 7,500 council houses. No you did not. If one looks at the actual local authority delivery, at what the State built, it built 2,800. In Dublin, which is the epicentre of the housing crisis, it built 546. In Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown last year it built two council houses. That was two council houses when 5,000 households are on the list, and nationally there are 120,000-----

Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage (Deputy Darragh O'Brien)

There are the AHBs.

Deputy Jennifer Carroll MacNeill

The Deputy is not considering the AHBs.

Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett

The AHBs are buying their housing from private developers. That is the reality. The bulk of social housing is actually private developers. The Government is still depending on the private developers and paying them extortionate prices. They are charging for the stuff they are doing with extortionate rents that nobody can afford. That is the actual reality.

I will tell the House how bad it has gotten even for affordable housing. I got a call this week from a teacher who said he is over the threshold for social housing but he is not eligible for the cost rental that is now being advertised in Delgany because he does not earn enough. Even the cost-rental scheme is not actually addressing the needs of the people to whom it is supposed to apply.

The Government's housing policy is in rag order. It is absolutely in rag order. The Government must reinstate the eviction ban until it gets its act together and delivers the social and affordable housing that we need to address this housing crisis.

The Taoiseach

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-----

Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett

These are the Government figures.

The Taoiseach

-----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 schemes such as help to buy, the first home scheme and other schemes that give people grants to bring derelict homes back into use. That is all paid for by the taxpayer and is all public money. In my view it is all the State.

Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett

Do not get me wrong. I know that AHBs contribute to the provision of social housing. I am in favour, especially when we have a €10 billion surplus, of the Government buying up a lot of the new developments, which otherwise would be rented at extortionate levels. We are swimming in money. Use that money to buy up the houses of people who are threatened with eviction and to buy up some of the new developments that would otherwise be rented out at extortionate levels or bought by wealth asset management companies which will sweat people with racketeering rents.

One must ask the question of how the Government failed and missed its targets. The big missing piece is the failure of the councils. The actual State delivery is pathetic. It is way below its targets. We are not building on public land. In many cases, the land that has been zoned and earmarked for social housing has not even been serviced to provide the housing in our area in big swathes of land.

There is a problem. The Government does not want to go back to the direct provision of council housing. It wants instead to rely on the private sector. That is at the root of our problem.

The Taoiseach

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 understand the depth of the crisis.

In respect of our targets, more than 30,000 new homes were built in Ireland last year. That does not include student accommodation or bringing derelict homes back into use. That was us exceeding the most important target. The thing that gives me the most encouragement is that we are now seeing 350 or 400 first-time buyers every week. We have not seen that since the Celtic tiger period and certainly not since 2010. There are 300 or 400 first-time buyers every week. There is a motion before the Dáil today to take away the help to buy and first home schemes and make things harder for first-time buyers. I ask everyone in this House to speak and vote against that Sinn Féin motion.

Deputy Noel Grealish

The previous Government, under the leadership of the Taoiseach, introduced an important grant scheme, the large scale sport infrastructure fund. It was a welcome innovation by the Taoiseach and the then Minister with responsibility for sport, Shane Ross. It involved an initial capital allocation of more than €100 million. As the Taoiseach is aware, many sports clubs and organisations around the country are looking to build large-scale facilities but with a cap of €300,000 on funding available under the sports capital and equipment programme, many of these major projects simply cannot go ahead. Several projects were allocated funding under the large scale sport infrastructure fund in January 2020 and I welcome the money that was allocated to projects in my constituency of Galway West. Those projects included the redevelopment of the Sportsground in Galway city by Connacht Rugby, the Galway regional aquatic centre and the Renville sports and community centre facilities in Oranmore, which I was delighted to see getting full planning permission from An Bord Pleanála in recent weeks.

The fund was very much welcomed by all the major sporting organisations. It was endorsed by the GAA, the IRFU, the FAI and many others. However, the fund has effectively been stalled since these allocations were announced more than three years ago. I firmly believe there is a real need for it to be reintroduced. It may sound obvious but international studies have shown that the presence of good sports facilities is associated with participation in physical activity and improved health among the general public as a result. These facilities also serve to bring communities together. The country needs such a scheme to be operational again. Will the Taoiseach and his Government seriously consider the reintroduction of a large scale sport infrastructure fund in the forthcoming negotiations on the next budget?

The Taoiseach

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 announced in January 2020 and so far, approximately €86 million has been allocated to 33 different projects. In terms of existing grants, so far only four projects have drawn down funding to date. The new athletics facility in Newcastle West is almost complete. The design work to replace Dalymount Park is almost complete. Construction has commenced in Walsh Park in Waterford. I am told construction has also commenced in Newbridge. It should be noted that allocations were announced in January 2020, just prior to the pandemic, which slowed progress considerably.

Representatives of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media met with all of the grantees as part of the Department's review of the fund. In addition to the four projects I mentioned, we now believe that 17 additional projects will be able to draw down some funding this year. That represents significant progress. The priority in the short term is to advance these existing projects but the possibility of opening a new call for proposals will be considered as part of the Estimates process in advance of budget 2024.

The immediate priority is to enable the projects that have funding granted to them to draw down some of that funding. The Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin, and the Minister of State, Deputy Chambers, working with the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, are very keen to open up a new round of funding for small clubs for capital and equipment, which happens every year, and they are also working on that.

Deputy Noel Grealish

I welcome the Taoiseach’s commitment to look at renewing this funding programme. I will outline what the allocation to the Renville sports and community grounds meant to a community like Oranmore. This project is a joint one by the local Oranmore Maree GAA club, the camogie clubs and the Naomh Mhuire ladies football club. Between them, they field an impressive 90 teams. They plan to construct a sports centre of excellence in Renville and Oranmore on a 34-acre site to include four new playing pitches and a covered terrace as well as community facilities like a public playground and walkway.

They were allocated €2.1 million in 2020 under the large scale sports infrastructure fund to develop these facilities and more than €1 million has been raised locally. This is just one community of 10,000 people who would never have been able to provide such an ambitious facility without the support of the large scale sports infrastructure fund. I ask the Taoiseach to give other communities around the country the same opportunity the Government gave to the Renville sports facility and Maree GAA club in Oranmore. I strongly urge the Government to reintroduce a new large scale sports infrastructure fund grant scheme in the forthcoming budget.

The Taoiseach

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 good for physical health, good for children, good for mental health, good for community and also helps to nurture those new athletes of the future who go on to high performance and win medals and trophies for the country. There are very few better ways to spend taxpayers' money than on sport. I assure the Deputy that we are working together to make sure we make progress on all of those things over the course of the year.