Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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I accept that progress is being made and I fully support the help-to-buy scheme, but analysis will show the numbers of, for instance, houses that have been built under the shared equity scheme and where they have been built. County Galway is the second largest county but there is only one private housing scheme within it. When any other developer is buying a site or looking for one to develop, he or she will go to the local authority or the approved housing bodies to see whether a deal can be done to sell it to them because the developers cannot get the funding at the right price to help them deliver. I am finding that someone who is working and does not meet the threshold for social housing is left renting at a high price and cannot get somewhere to live.

I am going on the experience of County Galway but I know this is also happening in Mayo and Roscommon, and I know from talking to builders throughout the west that something is amiss, because it is not happening there. When we talk about spending money and the schemes we have, I would like to see more data on what numbers are being developed in that regard, as opposed to social housing. We are building social housing at a pace at the moment, and I credit the Government with that, but we are leaving a cohort of people behind. Apartments in cities are not the housing that is needed in regional Ireland. That needs to be tackled.

When we talk about spending money on infrastructure, the pace at which we build and the processes we go through are leading to increased costs because of inflation. Under the rural regeneration scheme, for instance, the Department of rural affairs is doing great work with projects but the cost of implementing them, which may have been allocated money four years ago, has doubled. How are we taking that into account in what we are delivering and in the case of, for example, a section of road to be delivered and the cost of that now compared with five years ago? Part of the problem is that the processes that are in place are leaving us languishing without getting work done, and that is adding to inflation. Does Deputy Donohoe, as the Minister for public expenditure and reform, have the appetite to look at the processes by which we are seeing approvals across the board and stagnating progress on getting projects to construction?