Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Can I add a brief follow-up? I do not imagine, short of the socialist revolution or whatever, that we are going to completely get rid of private involvement in construction of infrastructure or housing. Can the construction industry seriously deliver the low-cost housing that is needed? I have many concerns about water infrastructure, energy infrastructure and so on but the most urgent question is the one of housing. Huge numbers of people are never going to be able to afford market prices, in my opinion. Look at what is happening in urban centres around the world. People on low to middle incomes cannot afford to live in these places. They have to go into the wilderness, which causes its own problems, to get something they might afford, if even that. Has the Construction Industry Federation any serious role to play in providing low-cost, social and affordable housing? I do not doubt they will play some role in providing housing for those on higher incomes who can afford it. It seems to me that affordable housing has to be subsidised. It has to be below market price. I do not really see how it is in the Construction Industry Federation's interests or that there is any likelihood that it will deliver that. If that is the case, I think we have to return to something that we used to do even when this country was quite poor, which was that the State directly built housing. It was up to 30% to 40% of housing at some points. It did it directly. It had people working in the local authorities who had the skills. I agree that there is a problem there with that skills base running down in local authorities and in the State generally. I think that is a problem. Do we not have to return to that?

I have one other brief point and my friends in the building industry would be very unhappy if I did not raise it. A very controversial issue over recent years, as employment has been picking up, has been the push for people working in the construction industry to go onto the C45 scheme. Many workers have said that this is contractors forcing people to declare themselves as self-employed when they are not self-employed and should be employed directly by the builders. They have also suggested quite a wide level of abuse of the category of self-employment, given the high proportion of it. Do the representatives of the Construction Industry Federation have any comment on that? It is a sore point for construction workers.