Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his time. As a politician who worked in construction for more than 30 years, I have a good idea of how to build a house and how to work in construction. To return to the point about investment in housing, many young people nowadays cannot afford to buy or build a house because the standards and conditions under which people now have to build them have gone beyond affordability. We are investing large sums in housing, whether in the form of housing delivered socially or through the affordable housing schemes, and I recognise the idea is to try to have housing for all. There are some fundamentals, however, that are not correct, and when we are spending all this money, little details get lost. One such detail I come across all the time relates to county development plans or local area plans. We zone lands for residential purposes without knowing whether it will ever become available in the lifetime of the plan because we do it as a desktop exercise. We zone land-locked land for residential use. We zone lands that can never be sold, for a plethora of reasons beyond anybody's control. We do not compulsory purchase order, CPO, lands we zone, and I do not think we should. More due diligence needs to be carried out in forward planning to ensure that whatever areas we zone are available. Otherwise, we are just creating a scarce resource, that is, land ready for development.

This issue has not been tackled. I have spoken to the Planning Regulator and the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage about it. It needs to be cracked on with. If we are zoning land and saying houses should be built in a certain area, the first question should be whether they can be built there.

There is another issue around housing. The national development plan is going to be published on Monday. It is going to involve large figures, billions of euro of taxpayers' money and money we have borrowed, to try to provide housing and all the other infrastructure we require and want. The big risk is that public works contracts are cumbersome to deliver. We can spend seven, eight or nine years without getting a digger on site or getting a builder in. The planning processes and approvals can take that length of time. Money will be announced in the budget but I believe we should be cherry-picking projects that are shovel-ready. That should be an immediate target for every local authority and public sector body, including the Office of Public Works. Those bodies should pick out projects that are ready to go because what is happening is that we make announcements and do not see anything happening on the ground for five, six or seven years. We have seen that is the case with flood relief schemes and all of those types of things.

Youth employment is a big issue. How do we get the youth back into work? How do we make work pay? That is another area of expenditure where we must create a difference between not working and working through the benefits that accrue to working.

Deputy Michael Healy-Rae was talking about building contractors. We have an amount of public sector works to which builders have signed up in the past five, six, seven or eight months. The contracts were based and priced on a particular set of circumstances that have now completely changed. People have entered into contracts and have found, before they go far into the project, that it is going to cost a hell of a lot more. The contracts at the moment are fixed price, with no price variation for increases in the cost of labour or materials. If we expect builders and contractors, as distinct from developers, to remain in business, we must tackle this issue head on. The Office of Public Procurement must deal with this issue as a matter of urgency. Many projects are at risk of closing down because people cannot afford to build them because of the increases and inflation that is there. We need to deal with that urgently and I would like to hear the Minister's comments in that respect.

Moving to infrastructure, the Minister mentioned the servicing of sites, water and wastewater. Irish Water is totally underfunded. It has been constantly fire-fighting since it was brought into being. It is dealing with risk and trying to solve the risk of pollution and whatever else. There are many towns and villages across the country that do not have wastewater treatment. Houses cannot be built in those places even though they may be growth centres for the main cities. That infrastructure is just not there and there does not seem to be any plan for when the provision of that infrastructure might happen. I know there is talk about funding becoming available under such a scheme. If Irish Water is to do its job properly, it needs to be funded properly in order to carry out all the remedial works that are required, as well as other works that need to be progressed if we are to build houses. I ask the Minister for his comments on what I have said and, if I have a minute or two at the end, I will come in again.