Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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I listened with interest to the contributions of the witnesses. I thank them for attending.

I come from a construction background. I am very frustrated by the lack of new ideas as to how we should get the private housing market, which is dysfunctional, working. I listened with interest to the proposal that we should not spend any of this surplus money we have and that we should be bank it all. I am of the view that we should spend some of this money, not all of it, on providing the infrastructure that is required. In the context of this morning's report from the Central Bank on housing, it is obvious that the one thing we need is serviced land. We have charged Irish Water with delivering wastewater and water services. It is struggling badly to do that. If you are looking for a connection from the company, you might have to wait six months. Imagine asking it to bring sewerage infrastructure to the east side of Galway city in order to open it up for development. I would argue strongly that if money was invested in that, it would not be a recurring charge; it would happen once. The economic benefit from that investment would be delivered for years to come.

Let us consider public transport, which was mentioned, and rail in particular. Take the example of the western rail corridor. For a very small amount of money, we could deliver infrastructure that would link Ballina, Castlebar, Claremorris and Tuam to Ennis, Limerick, Foynes port, Galway port, Cork port and Waterford port. We need to put in place another connection from Rosslare because that would provide connectivity right around the country for rail freight, which speaks to the green economy we need to get to. Businesses want this. How come we cannot do these kind of things? It is because we have set up - I ask the witnesses to comment on this - a system for the spending of public money that contains many barriers and that has added costs in the context of delivery. We set up all of these processes, the initial idea was to ensure we were getting value for money. I would strongly argue that we are not getting value for money because the processes we have set up are taking the value out of it. They are delaying project delivery. Time is money, and always has been. Inflation means that we are getting less for our money every year we delay starting a project.

I will give the witnesses one little example of a project, the Gort lowlands flood relief scheme, which would bring relief to a lot of people. In 2016, I set up the project to be surveyed and the works to be done on it. It is 2024 and we still have not got to a stage where we are going to go for planning permission for the project. We have the same type of scenario with the Galway city outer bypass, on which €50 million has been spent with absolutely nothing to show for it. Economists and others advise on how to spend money but I would like the witnesses to take a right good look at how we are doing our business in terms of the processes we have put in place. We have this thing about cost-benefit analysis and it is strangulating the economy and our ability to deliver infrastructure in my books. If we are to deliver on the private housing market, we have to invest wisely in delivering homes that will last for generations using some of this money that we have, and enough not to overindulge in or overheat the market. It is not that long ago since we were talking about demolishing houses because we had too many houses in the country. It probably demonstrates that we go in starts and busts, and stops and goes, and whatever. That is why we need to hold on to a good bit of that surplus money we have or the once-off money we get to try and fill the gaps when we get troughs in the economy.

I go back to the point that we have a planning system that is actually not working and it is costing people money. If one has a local area plan and land is designated to be used for residential purposes and has gone through a public process, I believe what we should be doing is building on that land without having to go through another planning process which could take years. I will leave those thoughts with the witnesses for the moment and maybe they might give me some comments on them.