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

I thank the Ministers and their teams for their contributions. The big thing people are thinking about at the moment is the surpluses the Government has announced and what might be done with them. The Minister said it would not be prudent, given the underlying deficit when we take out the windfall profits, to rely on revenues that may be vulnerable to significant changes in the future. That is not an unreasonable position but is it not the case that if the Government were to spend the surplus in a way that would not require ongoing current expenditure, and that might actually save ongoing current expenditure in the medium to long term, it would then be very prudent to ramp up our investment in a number of key strategic areas? Doing so would put us in a better position and reduce our vulnerability in the future, rather than putting the surplus in a piggy bank of one sort or another.

I would be interested to know a little bit about the piggy bank and what that is going to do with the money. Money is always invested somewhere. If we do not decide where it is invested, who will and what will it be invested in? It seems to be that it would be better for us to make the decisions and to invest it in ways that strengthen the resilience of our economy in the medium to long term and deal with some of the big problems and demands that we have. I want to tease that out a bit with the Minister. To give a few examples, we need a massive retrofit programme in this country.

We need to increase the grants we give to people. At the moment, people on lower and even modest incomes are far less likely to invest in retrofitting their homes because they cannot bridge the gap between the grants available and the cost of retrofitting. The better-off can afford it, take the grants and retrofit their homes. The gap is too big for people on low and modest incomes. Would it not be a sensible investment to increase grants massively for people on low and middle incomes to retrofit their homes, as there would be big savings down the line? For example, we could give big grants to people for solar panels, which will reduce their energy use, have a climate spin-off and reduce energy imports and usage generally. Currently, the pace of retrofit is very slow and it is generally the better-off who can afford it.

Another example is capital investment in public transport. There is a huge deficit in rural Ireland in public transport and we know we probably need to electrify the entire bus fleet. These types of capital investment will pay dividends down the road in climate and avoiding possible fines if we do not meet climate targets. These measures could massively improve our medium to long-term situation. Forestry is another example. Big investment is needed in the sector, which would pay off in the long term, again avoiding possible fines if we do not meet biodiversity or climate targets. We must invest in a new forestry model and use that money to increase dramatically our very poor afforestation levels. That would be good expenditure now that would not make us vulnerable because we can spend it now and if we do not have it in the future, it is not as much of a problem.

The big one is housing. All roads lead back to the housing crisis. Staff cannot be retained in many key areas. People are leaving the health service and the trades - I do not need to tell the Minister - because we do not have the housing. It is causing huge hardship for all those impacted. Is it not fair to say that for every extra publicly-owned house, we would save money in the medium to long term? It would save the current expenditure on the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, housing assistance payment, HAP, and leasing costs, which are pretty big, at approximately €1 billion a year. Although we need those schemes now, we could eliminate that current expenditure, which is set to increase, by increasing public housing stock through up-front purchases and allocating money in advance for ramped-up social and affordable housing targets. In any event, even according to the Minister's figures, the targets are inadequate to meet housing demand over the next period. Can we not ramp up the building targets and water infrastructure services needed on a lot of public land which is not being serviced at the moment? In my area, there is a lot of publicly-owned land that is not even planned to be serviced before the end of Housing for All. That would be capital investment, spending the surplus, but would pay dividends in the medium to long term and would not make us vulnerable; in fact, it would increase our resilience and deal with acute crises in housing. I would like to hear the Minister's response to that.