Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Taoiseach. I was in my office watching his opening statement and the other contributions, so have been following the meeting. The Joint Committee on Transport and Communications went out yesterday to the Go-Ahead depot in Ballymount. They told us of the difficulties they have in getting drivers into the system in terms of applying for a learner permit and getting their theory and driver test.

Quite unbelievably, there is a five-week delay between the time when they pass their driving test and when they get their certificate of professional competency, which is just a bureaucratic piece of plastic they need to have before they can get in the cab of the bus. There seem to be a lot of backlogs, possibly post Covid, all over the system, whether it is with national car tests, NCTs, driver testing and various other processes in driving.

There are also delays in planning processes. Representatives of Dublin Airport appeared before the committee the week before last. One of their key asks of us was about planning, getting stuff through the system faster, getting decisions made and being able to get on with it. Is there a whole-of-government approach to looking at where the backlogs are and how we are going to clear them? It is very frustrating for the ordinary person to discover that things that should not take a lot of time are taking weeks and months. There is a lot of that all over the system.

I want to raise a point about housing. While a lot of housing is being built, which is great, not all supply is as good all other supply. We tend to see a lot of build-to-rent housing now. Many younger people, and even people who are not so young, are trying to get units. Particularly in Dublin Rathdown, where I live, a lot of housing is being built to rent. People see construction happening and they are okay with it being built, even though some of it is a lot bigger than what some of them would be used to but the real challenge is whether there is housing to buy. A rule was introduced that funds cannot buy up an entire housing estate but they are able to buy whole apartment blocks and whole apartment schemes. We may be storing up problems in the longer term with that. Whatever about people being able to pay rent when they are in the workforce, as they head towards pension age there is a challenge for those people to be able to be spending significant amounts of money on rent. In the past, they would have been paying down their mortgage or possibly would have had no mortgage by the time they got to retirement and would have been able to live relatively comfortably on their pension.

I echo the comments of Deputy McGuinness in terms of politically exposed persons and all of the rules that are being brought in that are probably a deterrent. They are necessary in some ways but the processes around a lot of them - including the requirement to declare all of your bank balances every three months and so on - are very onerous, as is some of the legislation, and I am not sure exactly what the benefit of it is.