Pat Breen (Clare, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Quinlivan.

The Minister, Deputy Humphreys, and I travel on trade missions around the globe and this is not a problem that is just confined to Ireland. I was in Seattle last year, which is the home of Amazon and Microsoft, and I met the mayor there. The big problem there is shortage of housing for companies as well. This is a problem that is being addressed all over the place.

We have seen how successful we were in that area with the action plan for jobs. Rebuilding Ireland will be successful as well. Planning permissions were granted last year for nearly 29,000 new homes up to the end of the first quarter of 2019. That is up 21% from the previous year. In Dublin alone nearly 9,000 homes were granted planning permission. This is an increase again on the previous year. It is happening. Houses are being built.

The IDA has an important role when a company comes to Ireland in first of all ensuring that it comes. These companies bring their own estates people to look at where they want to locate first and in what regions they want to build. They select where they eventually want to go. They take all of that into account, namely, the housing and services in the area, the schools, universities and all of that. In recent times, the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, announced 800 jobs in LinkedIn last week and jobs with Facebook, amounting to a couple of thousand jobs, and all of these considerations are taken into account. The companies know they can get houses for their employees.

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