Chambers held housing data that would have changed election result – Sinn Fein

Minister Jack Chambers “deliberately deceived” the public during the election campaign by ignoring housing data, a Sinn Fein TD has said.

The party’s finance spokesperson Pearse Doherty said that if information on new-home builds had been made public, it would have changed the result of the election.

A spokesperson for Mr Chambers, who is now the public expenditure minister, said he rejects Mr Doherty’s claims.

Senior government figures have been criticised for claiming during the election campaign that close to 40,000 new homes would be built in 2024.

The Housing for All plan set a target of 33,450 new-builds for 2024, with a total of 30,330 built, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) – a drop of 6.7% on 2023.

Speaking on the Leinster House plinth on Thursday, Mr Doherty claimed that a document from the Department of Finance’s Budget & Economics Division showed the government had “decided consciously to mislead the Irish public”.

He said that before the Dail was dissolved on November 8, Mr Chambers – the then finance minister – received a report analysing data on housing progress.

The seven-page report states that there were 21,634 new homes completed in the first nine months of the year, 3.1% lower than the same period in 2023.

“The outturn for completions appears to be broadly consistent with recent downward revisions to forecasts from the Central Bank, which project housing output to be similar to 2023,” it said.

Mr Doherty said the report from the Budget & Economics Division of his Department made it “very clear” that it was “not achievable” to reach 40,000 new-builds by the end of the year.

“Despite this, we had the Minister of Finance go on the national broadcaster, on Virgin Media, on other radio stations, claiming that they were on a pathway to 40,000, that they were going to deliver far more houses than they delivered the previous year, which was simply untrue,” the Donegal TD said.

“Why did he deliberately mislead the Irish public? Why did he bury a report that he had from his department, which said that the prediction was that they would deliver the same, if not less, houses than the previous year?

“Why did he allow Micheal Martin, his party leader, to continue to trump the same untruth? Why did he allow the Taoiseach and others to do the same?”

Asked whether he believed the publishing of the housing figures would have changed the outcome of the election, Mr Doherty said: “If you have a report that comes out on the eve of the election, and the minister has to stand up and say ‘The officials in my department are of the same view as the Central Bank, and we’re likely to deliver less houses this year than we did last year’, then of course that’s going to change the outcome of the election.”

A spokesman for Mr Chambers said: “The Minister for Finance receives a monthly housing update which summarises reports, projections and publications in the public domain.

“The November 2024 submission referenced CSO data published on October 24th, 2024 and previous Central Bank projections.

“This information was not new. The CSO data had been published two weeks earlier and was debated in the Dail on the day of publication.

“The Minister was already aware of these inputs from the CSO and the Central Bank.

“Minister Chambers rejects the assertions by Deputy Doherty. There were many different bodies and agencies giving varied projections on housing numbers at the time which were in the public domain.”

Speaking in Washington DC, Taoiseach Mr Martin said his understanding of the issue was that the CSO statistics were already public knowledge.

He added that there were three other indications that the number of new-build houses in 2024 would be much higher than they were.

“But the bottom line is, we’re not building as much houses as fast as we possibly can,” he said.

“There are fundamental issues with the apartment side of it.

“I repeat what I said since this Government was formed: that there’s a very real need to enhance and increase the level of private sector investment in housing, and particularly in the apartment side of it, and Government will work to try and devise the best policies that can do that.

“The state is, by and large, the big player in the housing market at the moment, not just in terms of approved housing bodies or local authorities or the land development agency, but also around the financing mechanisms.

“I think the cost of finance for building is too high, and so we have to look at that issue as well and that’s when I said earlier, we have to work with the commercial banks that need to get more involved in making more money available at reasonable price to builders to build more effectively, because it’s a big problem.”