Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all our guests. It is great to have them here to have a chat about the financial matters that are most pressing. Following on from the discussion about housing, one of the biggest failings in housing at the moment relates to the fact the private sector is not functional, and it will not be functional until we step in to help it become functional by providing it with funding or resources in order that we can get people back building houses. I was talking to people in the building end of the sector today and they pointed out that politicians were saying they can build houses for a certain sum, but the builders who are trying to build them cannot do so at the cost at which they need to be built to make them accessible to people who want to get a mortgage. We are talking at the moment about social housing, affordable housing and so on, but affordable housing is not working in most of the country. It will work in the cities and in, for instance, Oranmore in Galway and the so-called MASP - metropolitan area strategic plan - areas such as Claregalway, but it will not work in Ballinasloe or Tuam, which is the largest town but in which a large housing estate has not been built since 2008 or 2009. There is a huge gap in the market. We are falling over ourselves about targets, but we are not following the target of private housing. How can we ignite that market and get it working again in the context of capital and financial measures such as taxation?