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

I am glad to get the opportunity to speak on these Report Stage amendments. I support the LDA because anything we can do to speed up the development of housing is welcome. I ask the Minister to clarify a number of issues. I have received a lot of phone calls today about stuff that is on Facebook and I ask the Minister to clarify matters on the record of the Dáil. It is being said that from next February in rural Ireland, if one's sole income is not from farming, one will not get planning permission. I would like the Minister to confirm that this is not correct. It is flying everywhere at the moment and rural Ireland must be thought about.

The set up of the LDA is going to be vital. I have said previously that I do not believe civil servants should be in it. The Minister needs to bring in people from the private sector and I am on record as saying that. It is not that I have anything against civil servants but we need people who have proven they can deliver. I would have people on bonuses to deliver and not on salaries where it does not matter whether they deliver one or 101 houses.

Those in charge of the LDA and the Minister must do something to address the ferocious logjams that exist at the moment because of judicial reviews, with approximately 10,000 to 15,000 houses held up in Dublin. An issue arose before the Minister's time related to architects. An architects alliance was formed because people were pushed outside of the system, even though they have years of experience. I ask the Minister to deal with them. I understand the Department is trying to resolve the issues. We need as many skilled people as we can get. There is a scarcity of hands, of skilled people. I urge the Minister to work on getting people to come back. There are people in other countries that we need here. They went to England when this country closed down. I refer to digger drivers, pipe layers, plasterers, brick layers. These are top-class, skilled people. A few years ago the Minister for Health offered incentives to healthcare staff to come back to the country. If one returns here from America or Australia, one cannot drive straight away. There must be joined-up thinking on ways to make it easy and attractive for people to come back to this country. We need to dangle some carrots, as well as making all of these other important things work. In order to get to work in Ireland, one needs a car because it is not always feasible to travel by bus.

Someone must call a halt to housing bodies, local authorities and the LDA all bidding for the same parcel of land. That cannot happen because if we keep at that, it is up that the price will go. If there are 35,000 sites in this country that are owned by the State and we put roads, sewers and footpaths in and we fully service those sites, there might be a 5% to 10% difference between building a house in Dublin or in Galway but that is it. An affordable three- or four-bedroom house is between €200,000 and €250,000 and not the figures I see printed everywhere at the moment.

I hope this works. In fairness, as the previous speaker said, a lot of legislation is being introduced. However, the bottom line is that we must attract the skilled labour that we need. I heard the Tánaiste talking about 40,000 houses per annum and it would be mighty if we could get to that figure but at the moment one could wait six months to get a plumber in some rural areas. We also need to tie in with the likes of the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science to address the class issues and the belief that brickies and plasterers did not spend very long in school.

We must appreciate that those people who are able to use their hands in building are the most skilled people. They are artists and we need to put them on a pedestal in the line of qualifications. Once a year, The Irish Timesor other newspapers detail what colleges students go to. Someone can have all the brains in the world but if he or she is not able to use them they are not worth a damn to him or her. These skilled people who can use their hands are as important to a country as any other person and if people cannot drive the digger, lay the pipe, plaster the house or lay the block, the steel structure for an office block or a roadway that can get the people who want to work into work, be it an accountant, a solicitor, or whomever, cannot be built. We need to make sure we appreciate those people. We also need to make sure that the cycles of bang and bust and high and low stop and that we try to do things on an even keel.

The Minister has a job ahead of him and I wish him the best of luck with it. I hope this works out but the Government should not go down the route of the likes of Irish Water. Irish Water needs more funding because it needs to plan ahead to put in the water and sewer infrastructure required for three, four or five years into the future. This Government will be gone and another Government will enter office. Regardless of who is in power then, Irish Water needs to be planning four, five and six years ahead for what will be needed for housing on sites. If that is not done there will just be a complete bang.

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