Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The properties I am talking about are not houses at the moment. They are derelict structures in towns and villages, and young people are willing to get involved in them and take on the challenge of doing them up and living in those towns and villages. There is no incentive for them to do that, however, and in some cases, services such as sewerage may not be there. This would not add to inflation. The Minister stated he wants to increase the supply of housing, and this is one of way of doing so and at the same time rejuvenating towns and villages. The schemes currently in place through the Departments of the Ministers, Deputies Humphreys and Darragh O'Brien, are there to provide public areas and public realms and buildings, but there are private properties too and people just need a bit of an incentive. I think it would be a game changer.

The next issue I want to raise, in the context of future budgets and the NDP, relates to construction cost inflation. It has been reported that because we closed the construction industry, we have lost up to 40,000 people who have gone to the UK to work. We need to get them back. They are people with skills such as engineers, project managers, quantity surveyors and so on as well as skilled labourers. When we come to implementing the NDP and try to regenerate the economy through capital expenditure, the level of inflation in construction may be different from that of overall consumer price inflation. There may be a spike in inflation in construction because material prices are increasing as a result of many factors, including the lack of supply of native timber and other resources and the increase in the price of steel, which is a scarce commodity at the moment. In the context of the NDP and the funding in that regard, we may not get as much buck for our pound as we think we will. What kind of contingency planning will be done to account for that?