Opposition accused of ‘pure politics’ over housing

Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy has accused the opposition of using the housing issue to simply “embarrass” the Government and described threats of a motion of no confidence in him as “pure politics” by Sinn Féin.

Mr Murphy finds himself under fire after it emerged on Thursday that one in three of all the new homes thought to have been built over the past seven years never existed.

The Central Statistics Office reported that some 85,154 new houses and apartments were calculated to have been built from 2011 to 2017, but the true number was 53,566 — just 63% of what was believed.