Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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I thank the Ministers. We are talking about all the money we have. It is dangerous times because it is about how we can spend it wisely rather than just throwing it around the place. I said it last year and I agree with the fact that we need to be putting some of this money into a future fund and a climate fund. We also have an opportunity to do something with some of this money to address a number of issues we have with regard to our infrastructure and housing. It is not to throw the book or more money at it; it is the way in which we are doing our business in delivering houses. I believe the local authorities have now scaled up, have developed the skill set to deliver housing schemes, and they are doing it. Deputy Durkan spoke about funds buying houses but at the moment a private builder building houses will not start them unless he has a contract to buy them all and usually it is the local authority. That is a bit counterproductive. We all know that the private housing market as such, as we knew it, where a developer built houses and young people would get a mortgage and buy them, is not happening because the houses are too expensive. It is not viable. What we need to do is to make sure the affordable housing scheme that we are putting in place will work not just in cities but in towns as well. In my case, the affordable housing scheme in place in Tuam is not working right. The numbers do not add up. The houses are not affordable yet. There needs to be tweaking of that.

If we take this morning's Central Bank's report on housing, it referred to developing and having serviced lands. When we do our county development and our local area plans, there is a core planning strategy by which we can only zone so much land. What happens is we are making it a scarce commodity before we start, so we are driving up the price of the house. We should be zoning a lot more land and then we should be servicing that land as quickly as possible. Some of the money that is coming at the moment should be used to deliver the services to sites so that they are available to be built on. Irish Water needs to have a huge change in the way it is doing its business because it is just not happening quickly enough. Then we have a situation where we have taken all of the wastewater treatment plants away from local authorities, which were operating them 20 years ago. In towns and villages in Galway, and right across the country, there are places where there are no wastewater treatment plants and therefore no houses can be built. We will not allow a private developer put in his own wastewater treatment plant even to the guidelines of Irish Water and under its supervision. Irish Water has to do it but it will never happen because it will not get around to everything.

My pet subject is transport. We have an opportunity now to deliver on the western rail corridor and on other rail projects that will add benefit to the regions in Ireland. It will also balance the fact that west and the north-west region is an area in decline. According to the EU, it is a lagging region because our investment per capita is not the same as the rest of Europe or the rest of Ireland. We have a huge opportunity.

There is a lot of controversy about Dublin Airport and how it is congested and this, that and the other. We have fine airports in Knock, Shannon and Cork and we should be making sure we build the public transport infrastructure so that these airports can grow and become economic drivers in their areas.

I hope the Minister will look at the western rail corridor, for instance. It is a project that could begin and be delivered within two years. It is not a project; it is a refurbishment as opposed to a complete new job. We have to take opportunities. I spoke about it earlier. With the processes we have in place - if we take flood relief schemes, for instance - it takes years to deliver a project. Infrastructural projects are taking years and every year we delay is costing more money. We have a situation at the moment where Irish Water is cancelling contracts. It is not going ahead with them. We have TII cancelling projects. Its budget for this year has been spent. It is not getting as many of the projects it was expecting to do done. We need to look at that without fuelling inflation. At the end of the day, investment in water, serviced sites, wastewater and affordable housing projects will give us a payback very quickly. It will be an investment, not an expense, and it will not be just throwing money away. We have to measure it in a way that we do not inflate the whole thing and drive it all out of bounds entirely. However, planning is definitely a big thing in terms of how we zone lands and get away from the culture of being very conservative and not giving us a chance to build these houses we so desire.

Coming to current spending and things like that, I have come from a disability matters committee meeting and its members were talking about transport. I hope that in this budget the Ministers will look at the primary medical certificate and the criteria set out for that because it is so important. People are being refused a medical certificate basically because the criteria are so narrow. It has been under review for a long time. This is going back to long before I was in the Dáil when transport supports were suspended. We do not have supports now for people with disabilities. That is something we should do. The other thing we should do regarding disabilities and older people is to make sure the review done on housing adaptations and housing aid for older people will be implemented or costed into the budget so that we can see more money being made available to meet the demands to try to keep people in their homes for as long as possible.