Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Deputy on that. One person with whom I am acquainted who is a firefighter in a small station has told me that some crews are down to five or six members now. They are not able to recruit new members. There are posters outside the stations trying to recruit people. This individual told me that one of his children got first communion and there was a meal afterwards. The numbers are so depleted now that he is on call 24-7, 365 days a year and it has been like that for himself and his colleagues for years. He had to get up and go during the meal. The pager went off and he had to get up and leave. There is a practicality there. Furthermore, employers are not as well disposed as they were in the past to staff walking off the job to fire fight. A firefighter could be working in a local garage, for example, and the pager goes off. I recall working with people years ago who were in the fire service and the employer tolerated it but the way things are now, they are not as tolerant of it. There is a real urgency to getting this sorted. I ask Mr. Doyle and Ms Connors to convey the sense of urgency around this to their respective Secretaries General. There is a safety issue, as well as equality issues.

I want to go back to the issue of housing targets on which this committee received correspondence very recently. While I accept that the officials are not responsible for this, various Ministers have said that the number of houses built by local authorities last year is the same as the number built in the 1970s but that is not the case. They did not come within an ass's roar of it. There were 1,666 units built by the local authorities, according to the Department's figures, and AHBs built 310 units under the two funding streams they use. That is what is on page 13 of the aforementioned correspondence. Essentially, 2,000 houses were built but only 1,666 were built by local authorities. The figure of 7,400 given is made up of turnkeys and units built under Part V, known as local authority Part Vs, LAPVs. AHBs are also using Part V. The use of turnkeys is obviously causing a problem for first-time buyers and so on. In reality, local authorities are building one fifth of what they were building in the 1930s and the 1970s. I want to address this issue with the officials. Part of the problem is the level of bureaucracy. I know that the Department has facilitated and funded extra staff for the local authorities but things are not moving at the pace required. The year before last, only 818 units were built by local authorities, according to the Department's figures.

We are not building at scale. I appeal to the Department to address this. I do not want to hear the officials to talking about uniform standards and so on. We need a uniform plan. The Minister was opening houses in County Laois a couple of weeks ago and I mentioned this to him. He opened a small scheme of ten houses in Ballyroan that included both semi-detached and terraced units. Why is it that the plans used there cannot be used elsewhere with the agreement of the architectural firm that designed the scheme? I am just giving that as an example. There is also a group of 25 houses in Durrow, and a number of other schemes in the county, including on Harper's Lane in Portlaoise. We are talking about terraced houses, some of which are high density while others are lower density. Why can those plans not be mass produced? Why can the architects not being given royalties and their designs reused? Why is that not being done? I have raised this issue with the Department previously. If we want to do something at scale, we have to mass produce. That is true for anybody who ever made anything. Let us take the example of a carpenter making a table. If we give him a different design for each table that we want, he is going to be very slow. If we give him a standard design and ask him to produce 100 tables, he will turn them out like hot buns once he gets to the 20th or 30th table. It is the same with local authorities and builders. If builders are trying to work off a different plan each time, progress will be slow.

I have checked with various local authorities since I last raised this issue and the figure coming in for fees to architectural firms is 11% plus. Before we even start negotiating the cost of building, we have between 11% and 14% of the budget - hard-earned taxpayer's money - being whittled away on architectural fees for design. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are good-quality units not being mass produced? The units in any of the schemes that the Minister visited that day could be replicated in any town or city. It is possible to do high density with them. Some of the four schemes he visited are high density while others are lower. Why is that not being done in the interests of cost and speed?