Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I will not delay the committee too long because I have to go to another committee meeting. It was interesting to listen to what both Dr. Kinsella and Dr. Healy had to say. One of the things I have a concern about in where we are now is that we are pumping a lot of money into supports and then I hear Dr. Kinsella say the 2020 fiscal rules will come back into play again. Will we have a cliff edge in that regard and, if so, where will we go from there if we are trying to build an economy? It is being said that the economy could itself write off all our deficits but we could also have a rise in taxes and spending cuts. These are all the options we have. One of the concerns I have with all this is that right now we have pent up savings and a lot of money being put into supporting the economy, business and people who are out of work, which is all good and needs to be done. However, are we fuelling an inflationary economy?

Coming to social justice and what is going on in housing, one of the concerns I have is that we are talking about building so many units every year and saying we will make sure that between the private sector, social housing and so on we will build more houses. The truth of the matter is that at the moment the cost of building houses is rising substantially. We are also looking at increasing densities. I am afraid we will get back to creating ghetto-type developments and over-itensification and to providing housing in units and boxes for people and that we will not provide the amenities and social services required with all that.

I am concerned we will have a kneejerk reaction to situations in the private housing sector. In my rural constituency in Galway, we cannot get houses to rent and we cannot build houses in our towns and villages because we do not have the infrastructure. We have a housing crisis right across the country, not just in the cities or whatever. How do we temper all of that to make sure we deliver 35,000 houses and how do we actually deliver them? Has anybody come up with a plan for that? The cost of building these houses is rising rapidly from an inflationary and regulatory point of view. We are putting more and more into passive houses, insulation and so on. That is all very well and good, but we are putting houses out of the reach of first-time buyers and out of reach of social delivery. We will get less units because we are putting more cost into delivering them. What is the reaction of Dr. Kinsella and Dr. Healy to those two comments?