The Labour Party has proposed a €2.5 billion fund to help young people buy their first homes.
Outlining its housing policies in Dublin today, the party said it would introduce a "Begin to Buy" scheme to enable people start purchasing a home as soon as they are in full-time employment.
The system would be administered by the local authorities, which would be reformed to deal with their new function, the party pledged.
Applicants would be assessed to establish the size and location of housing required and, separately, an assessment would be made of the amount the person could afford in loan repayments.
They would then be approved to buy a home on a shared-equity basis, buying a minimum of 25 per cent, with the local authority purchasing the rest. Over time, applicants would have the chance to increase their share of the home, Labour said.
The party said it proposed to finance the measure with about €2.5 billion administered by the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). Assuming about 10,000 transactions each year, the scheme would cost around €100 million a year.
Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte said the doubling of housing lists and successive interest rate increases were affecting people who were struggling to get on the property ladder.
"All of that adds to the burden on young people in particular at the beginning of their careers, many of whom have been forced to buy housing a very long way from where they were born and living and want to live," Mr Rabbitte said.
Asked about Labour's plans to reform stamp duty and fears that the changes would merely be reflected in increased selling prices, Mr Rabbitte said the tax itself had grown "disproportionately unfair" and that some people were now forced to borrow just to pay stamp duty on their homes.
"Nobody can say, and no economist can say, that there won't be some element of the reforms pocketed by the seller. But I think it will be minor, and I don't think it is the case that somebody has a fixed amount of money to purchase a house and the market will rise to that level," he said.
Mr Rabbitte said the current Government had "abandoned" couples to the mercies of the housing market. "They [the Government] have presided over a generous regime of tax breaks for investors in residential property, but they abolished the first-time buyers' grant," he said.
Labour environment spokesman Eamon Gilmore said the party, in government, would increase local authority output of social housing. It would ensure that affordable housing schemes deliver "a minimum of 5,000 homes per year by strengthening the Part V provision of the Planning Act".
That provision requires developers to set aside 20 per cent of their schemes for affordable housing. Mr Gilmore said the system had not worked.
"If that had worked, up to now we would have had 30,000 or 40,000 houses coming through the system. We have only had 3,000 up to now," he said.