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

On the housing issue, I fully agree with the comments about the labour shortage and bottlenecks and the need to address these issues as a matter of urgency. They need to be addressed in multiple ways. We need more apprentices and more people trained in the construction trades. Immigrants or returning Irish people can help us solve this issue. The Irish might come back if we can incentivise them in some way.

The witnesses mentioned two other things which I am not so sure about and I would like to see evidence for them. The first was the reference to planning bottlenecks. This is a controversial political area and the controversy around it will be seen fairly clearly in the Dáil tonight over the ramming through of the planning and development Bill. I ask the witnesses to consider that they should be a little bit careful about using that refrain of "planning bottlenecks", without evidence to back it up. I would say that the evidence is that there are way more granted planning applications than there are commencements. In other words, if we actually look at planning permissions given for residential properties, there is no shortage of them. They are way in excess of what is actually being built. Yet, the refrain is used by certain people from certain quarters that there is a bottleneck and problems with planning. This then becomes an excuse for ramming through Bills, such as the one tonight, that potentially subvert public consultation and concerns about sustainable planning. I would like the witnesses to back up, with evidence, their assertion that there are planning bottlenecks. I put it to them that there are other bottlenecks but not planning bottlenecks.

Second, diversification of finance was mentioned in the context of international investment funds investing here. It was suggested that this was a good thing in trying to address the housing crisis.

I would challenge the witnesses to give us some evidence of where that proposition has shown itself to be a good thing. There is an equally credible argument that it has not at all been a good thing and that rather than really stimulate the sort of housing construction we want to see, what it has actually done is profiteer off the housing shortage and take control of the housing market, manipulate the availability of zoned land and sites that could be developed, manipulate the prices, drive up rents, crowd out ordinary people from buying and generally exacerbate the housing crisis.

I would like to hear the witnesses' response to that because we need to be careful what we say in this space. There is at least a credible argument, and it is one I would hold, that we would be better off not having this diversity of international investors that are primarily driven by commercial and profitability concerns and instead have a more State-directed approach in terms of the control of building land and development of suitable building land for the sort of housing that is needed rather than what certain people think is a profitable enterprise.

There is a surplus of commercial property. To me that is evidence of the problem with people who are just chasing profits. We now have a massive surplus, and that then exacerbates the labour problem because people should be building social and affordable housing. Local authorities are struggling to get labour and tell us they are having procurement problems. Part of the problem is that they are building commercial property, which is not a priority, and, in fact, there is a surplus of it. I would be interested to hear the witnesses' comments on those. I have a few other questions about consumer protection and so forth, but they might comment on those.