Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I sincerely thank the Regional Group for this excellent motion. The simple fact is that this problem is becoming more and more serious as the days and weeks go by. Of course, the Ukrainian people are most welcome here in their time of need but this compounds the problems and difficulties we have in trying to take care of and cater for everybody. I really believe there is one thing we have to do.

Every town in every county had small building contractors and bigger contractors in recent decades. Now we are living in a society where, if a politician, including a Minister, was seen to be talking to "contractors" it would be outrageous and people would be questioning it. Of course we should be talking to them and we should all be standing up here on a Tuesday talking about how we met developers and contractors, be they big, small or medium-sized, who are looking to build homes. These people provide local employment and they will start providing us with much-needed housing. The whole system seems to be that if you are labelled as a builder or contractor that is something bad. It is not bad. Bad things happened over the decades but that was not everybody. The vast majority of building contractors in Ireland were fine and respectable people in our communities. Unfortunately they are gone now and they cannot get access to money to build houses. They cannot get planning permission to build houses or zoned land to build them on. These are the difficulties we have to get around and we have to shake off the idea that politicians cannot work with builders. Of course we can and of course we should.

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