Ms Patricia King:

State aid rules may be cited as an impediment to achieving this outcome but we must get beyond that in the negotiations.

My final point on this issue encompasses some of the other issues raised by Deputy Boyd Barrett.

During the financial crisis, we were in Europe. One of my concerns is that Europe put its foot on Ireland's neck and told us not to burn the bondholders because it set the rules and we had to do things its way. Those of us who lost pay, pensions or, unfortunately, jobs knew what that meant - we would be sacrificed. If it was done once, it can be done twice.

My next point is for whoever will lead these negotiations on Ireland's behalf. There will be bright and brilliant European people involved, but if their main aim is to protect the European model, they will not worry about the man with 50 head of cattle in Leitrim any more than they did when making rules on fiscal Europe. Speaking as someone who has engaged in complex negotiations for years, the Irish negotiating team must get into Mr. Barnier's head, tell him what we want out of this and let it be known that, if we do not get it, we will veto the decision. We cannot just accept that these jobs are going to go. It is a simple point and people might dismiss its simplicity, but I am making that comparison. We have had experience of Europe. Let us face it - social Europe has been gone for ten or 15 years.

I represented workers in the arts and culture sector for years. It is one of the lowest-paid sectors in our economy. That is terrible. We have been fighting for 12 years to get legislation through on collective bargaining rights for workers in that sector, which might be a reflection of how people view it.

I might not have answered all of Deputy Boyd Barrett’s questions as fully as he wanted, but I will comment on housing. The familiar statistics and charts tell their own story about local authorities pulling out of housing but we need to get right the issue of land, its price and what developers are doing with it. The National Economic and Social Council, NESC, a body that I am attached to on behalf of ICTU, has done good work. Those who read that work will get a good exposition of the situation as regards land and its price. Every area’s representative bodies have come up with good stats on the cost of land as a component of building ordinary, semi-detached, three-bedroom houses. It is in the range of €45,000. We are told that 27,000 planning permissions are ready, but why are they not being executed? It is because of an ongoing row. We do not hear of it verbally, but there is an issue with the availability of land. That land is the base price component of housing and the cause of much of its cost thereafter.

The private sector goes into business to make a profit. That is understandable. The private sector is seeking housing incentive packages from policy makers, for example, 9% VAT. Since the Kenny report, land in Ireland has accumulated a large amount of betterment that the public has not benefitted from but from which developers have. That is wrong.

The Deputy might not have read about it but we have argued that there should be compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, on land. A CPO can be applied on a route from Cork to Dublin, but what is more important than housing people? This is the social housing point of view but CPOs should also be considered in respect of vacant properties. We understand property rights, courts and everything else but it might be possible to make this process work and allow the State to take over after a certain time.

There must be strong State involvement. The State should start providing houses, as it used to do previously. Some of us grew up in them and know them well. The land issue, which is not often debated, needs to be dealt with and the price of that component of housing should be reduced.