Johnny Guirke (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Regulation of Providers of Building Works Bill 2022 is welcome. How many times have we heard of incompetent builders leaving homeowners paying the bill after shoddy workmanship or builders getting planning permission for housing developments and not finishing those developments or housing estates before moving on, leaving the State or local authority to foot the bill in finishing the work? How many times have we heard of issues with new schools?

In 2011, the then Minister, former Deputy Phil Hogan, set up a three-person independent panel to explore options for an agreed resolution to the problems caused by the presence of pyrite and make recommendations to prevent similar cases in future. A decade later, we are still dealing with pyrite and now mica. We need consumer protection so if people hire a builder and there is a problem with the work or a company goes out of business, the homeowners would have the same consumer rights as if they had bought a kettle or fridge.

The other matter in the building industry is the cost of building materials going through the roof. The rising cost of building materials is the biggest post-Brexit worry for anybody trying to get on the property ladder. Late last year, builders or contractors could not stand over the prices they gave only three months earlier, and if they had, they would have gone out of business. A recent survey of the members of the Construction Industry Federation indicates that 77% of building companies have problems hiring skilled labour, with 47% struggling to get raw materials for jobs and 99% of respondents indicating a year-on-year increase in building materials. Of the respondents, 80% fear more increases are coming.

This all means the average cost of building a four-bedroom bungalow is €50,000 more now than it was in 2019. That is before people even start to furnish their house. I spoke with a furniture importer the other day who told me before the pandemic the company could import containers for $3,000, whereas the same container has import costs of $17,000 now. That is just the shipping cost. That means every suite of furniture in the container costs an additional €500 or €600. It costs more to ship the container than the value of what is in the container in many cases. If all these costs keep rising every month, it will have a major impact on the price of building or buying a house and push a new home further out of the reach of ordinary workers and families.

See this speech in context