Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We can talk in here until the cows come home about affordable housing but Government policy, especially since the Green Party went into government and got its way on so many issues, means that affordable housing is a pipe dream. Every action the Government is taking is adding huge costs, including the cost of insulation and timber, because we cannot cut forests, and the costs of all the other materials we have to import. It is just pure nonsense. People must be mesmerised and sick to the teeth of listening to us talking about this in the House, especially the homeless and the thousands of people in County Tipperary who are waiting for houses. Then we have the young men and women who have a site and are able to build a house but are not allowed to do so. There are also issues with councils refurbishing houses. In the case of Waterford City and County Council, for example, in any house it retrofits, the chimney is blocked. There are to be no more chimneys in any of the new houses that are in planning. I spoke to a farmer last week who is having problems getting planning permission for his daughter. He has 300 acres of land with timber and everything else.

Everything is being done to drive costs upward. Houses are non-affordable instead of affordable. We talk in this House about why housing cannot be built. It must be profitable for a builder - I am talking about small builders, not the big developers - to build a house, but it is not. The cost has gone higher and higher. There are issues with all the waste material. We have gone over the top with disposal costs as well. We have had regulation after regulation and, hey presto, we have a new planning regulator, which is another big quango. The first time ever I heard of it was in regard to the Cahir town plan that was done recently. The person in charge is a planner all his life and now he has the power and is diminishing the powers of local authorities.

It is shocking. Cahir was forced to dezone from 50 ha down to 10 ha. I hope this will be changed now. The council has come out this week to build on a site to which the councillors had objected because it is a green area in a housing estate. The council is going building there after rezoning 50 ha elsewhere in the town, taking away the green space it had. The policies are those of a nincompoop. It is an upside-down, mixed-up world. It is crazy. If you were to put the whole lot into a cement mixer, mix it all up and churn it out in a heap, you would get more common sense out of it. There is absolutely no common sense whatsoever. The people who want to build the houses will not be let build them, and the builder cannot afford to build them because of all the regulations and baloney. I could call it something a lot stronger but I will not use the world I am thinking of in our national Parliament. A hundred years on from the freedom Dan Breen, Seán Treacy, Michael Collins and Liam Lynch fought for, now we are tied up in knots, with regulation after regulation and officers, officials and regulators wielding power like latter-day gods. They are like Stalin.

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