Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will touch on that later with the SCSI in relation to the levy and the figures being provided. I am not questioning it but when you decide to exclude certain things, then the overall costs and the true costs are also excluded.

I will turn to Mr. Parlon with regard to the Construction Industry Federation, CIF. I welcome his statement which took into account of the changes that happened in the last week in terms of the reduction of the levy and the exclusion of precast concrete. He said that this revised levy will have an impact on the delivery of housing and he mentioned issues in terms of the negative effect on the affordability of housing, likely pausing further developments. We are in the middle of a crisis in terms of housing. We are talking to developers. We are talking to people all the time. We see costs going up. The SCSI mentioned that concrete has gone up by 37% in the last year. Developers are telling me plasterboard has gone up by 10% in the last couple of weeks. There seems to be no end to this.

Is this additional levy, on top of everything else, really causing people to reconsider developments? Is that really what is happening in the sector, or is it likely that this will just be passed on? Mr. Parlon talked about price points, which is an amount people can stretch to. I think we are well past that, in my view, but could he give an assessment on that?