Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I worked in the construction sector for many years, be it in housing, pipework or whatever. Last Saturday night, I watched the news and the headline from the Fine Gael Ard-Fheis was the Tánaiste announcing that Fine Gael was committing to building 40,000 houses every year. That is great if the Tánaiste knows of a way to do this, but as someone who has worked in the sector for many years, I asked myself what cunning plan our Tánaiste has come up with.

Besides the point of having even half of it as affordable or social housing, about €10 billion would be needed with another €10 billion needed from the private sector. Can the Tánaiste tell me how we will get over the obstacle that there are 200 quarries in a planning quagmire? Can he tell me how the 14,000 or 15,000 houses that are on judicial review are going to get sorted? Unfortunately, things are being challenged day in, day out. Can the Tánaiste tell me why the forward planning of Irish Water is not funded for the next four to five years? I talk to Irish Water on a regular basis. If that funding is not put in place, there will be a problem.

The Tánaiste might not know about a thing called DoneDeal. If one looks around Dublin or in any other city, one will see that there are no lorry drivers available to take muck away from sites. One cannot get a theory test or even apply for a driving licence if one wants to go down that road. Blocklaying in a rural house in a rural area is gone from €6,000 to €16,000. The price of timber is gone up by 46%. I have spoken to the Tánaiste personally about the saga in Ireland but it is not only in Ireland. Timber is brought in as well and it is a bidding market. It is not about getting materials or the price of same but it is a question of whether the materials can be got because America and other countries are giving better prices when the boats are on the high seas.

I know the Tánaiste has spoken about apprenticeships before. We seem to put people who are accountants or whatever on a pedestal, and rightly so, but we do not seem to put the person who is the blocklayer, who is in what I call the wet trades or any apprentice on the same pedestal of people who go down a different road. Whether we like it or not, if we do not have the people who can drive the digger, lay the pipe, put down the tar, lay the blocks or do the steel structure, we will not have someone doing it with a computer. I am asking the Tánaiste if he can shed light on this for me because it is like Christy Moore's song; I thought about it for a while and "The dream turned into a nightmare" for me when I started asking myself how we will get around all of these obstacles.

The other part of this is that we had the climate action Bill last week. The Greens, who are delusional in my world, believe we will reduce emissions when we need to build 40,000 houses per year. I do not disagree with the Tánaiste on that, but I ask him to tell me how we can square the circle.

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