Housing, the most basic requirement in a developed country.

He told the Dail: "The government I led has, in the last few years, built 515,000 houses. The vast majority of those houses have gone to first-time buyers."

The government built these houses?

Did Paddy the Plasterer give them a dig out?

Apart from devoting his talents to the building site, Ahern's assertion that the vast majority of these houses went to first-time buyers is hokum. At least a quarter are estimated to be the preserve of investors.

Another major chunk went to those trading up.

The Taoiseach rejected the proposition that wealthy businessmen would naturally be inclined towards the interests of the person the hat was passed around for. Really?

If anything shows how Ahern grades society's hierarchy of interests, it is housing.

In a country awash with money, over 43,000 families are without a home. Hundreds of thousands of others struggle madly to buy and keep one.

How? Why?

In 1999, a Fianna Fail minister decided to reassert the party's credentials as one that ensured the less well-off were taken care of. Environment minister Noel Dempsey inserted a clause in the new Planning Act. Part V stated that every new private development was to include a 20% element set aside for social and affordable housing.

This was not a socialist wheeze. Building houses is not the same as selling widgets.

As the concrete dries on new estates, the foundations that will shape tomorrow's society are laid. Past mistakes have shown that herding those at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum into large estates stores up problems.

Dempsey's plan heralded a new attempt at integration, which might, over the longer run, reap benefits.

The short-term effect would have been to decelerate the soaraway housing market. An exclusive development that wasn't peopled exclusively by those who consider themselves exclusive, would sell for less . . .

maybe, if these things had a bit of symmetry, up to 20% less.

There could have been a knock-on effect in the wider market. Developers and builders would not reap such vast profits. Something had to be done to stop this madness.

Enter the succeeding minister for the environment, Martin Cullen. In 2002, Martin received 34,000 in political donations, much of it from builders. By coincidence, the following year he rowed back on Part V to quench the builders' ire. Everybody else thought Part V was a great idea. But it would seem these interests have to be weighed up and Cullen, Ahern's minister, came down on the side of those who buttered Fianna Fail's political bread.

Since then, social and affordable housing policy has been a disaster. Builders hand over money instead of building, but little gets done. At least four local authorities have failed to build anything in the sector over the last three years. Only five have built more than 100 homes. Out of 81,000 housing units built last year, just 830 were for the social and affordable sector.

Lately, Ahern's government has gone further. Land in wellheeled areas, like Broc House in Ballsbridge and a site in Harcourt Terrace in the city centre, have been swapped by the state for social houses at the edge of Dublin, in Clondalkin and Clonsilla. The government is now colluding with builders to ensure there is as little social integration as possible. The imperative is to trot out statistics to show Bertie the builder is hard at work.

The reality is that social integration is bad for business.

On housing policy, Fianna Fail wrestled with its conscience and won. This is the government led by Ahern, the man of the people who has never lost the run of himself.

He is attuned to the problems of Josephine Citizen, but she must take her place in the queue behind the interests of those who fund the party and, when he found himself in moderate financial difficulty, gave him a dig out.

He can dance on the head of a pin to the tune of ethics and tax law. But give us a break from the man-of-the-people routine.