Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak here this evening on this historic occasion. First, I offer my sincere congratulations personally to Leo Varadkar on his elevation to Taoiseach once again and compliment Micheál Martin on the work he did over the past two and a half years.

Listening to all the debate today, I will say at the outset we have a great country and we have great people but we have some real issues we need to resolve. I was taken by the remarks on the appointment of the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, to the Department of Public Expenditure and NDP Delivery and Reform.

We have a great national development plan but in the implementation and delivery of it we are failing the people. It is also coupled with the problems in housing and in health. We cannot move projects quickly enough to get them done to meet the demands there. I will give a few examples of where we could improve things. There was an announcement yesterday by the Minister for Health about the cancer centre for Galway. The previous week there was the announcement of an elective hospital for Galway and I think one for Cork as well. These have been in the pipeline for a good while. We also have an emergency department in Galway for which enabling works have been done, but for which no planning permission has been applied. The root cause of this slow process is the fact everything we do takes a year or 18 months of appraisal, cost analysis, or whatever before any real work gets done. The example I will give, which the Minister knows well, is the radiotherapy unit in Galway. It is a fine building but from inception to completion it will be a 17-year programme. I will wager that if we take 17 years to deliver the rest of that infrastructure, and I am only talking about Galway, we will be in right trouble in terms of delivering our health. We all know that, so we need to change something about the way we are doing our business.

I therefore say to the incoming Ministers that in doing something like this and making this change, we must also make a change to the way we do our business. Even if we must take shortcuts in the short term to get jobs going it is well worth the risk. Everybody tells me that with health delivery, it is not about money but infrastructure and if we have the proper infrastructure we will get the proper consultants, make a better job of it and have a better society as a result. Our patients deserve to be treated with dignity, especially in the Saolta Hospital Group where a person's chance of recovery from cancer are less than they are in any other part of Ireland. That is wrong. It is something we should prioritise and no spending code can justify delaying making that right. That is the first part.

I listened to the Minister, Deputy Ryan; he speaks passionately. The better energy, warmer homes scheme is a great initiative but it is taking an age to get it delivered. People are waiting up to 12 months for work to start once it is approved. We must do something about that. One of the causes of that is we are not using the potential we have within our local authority system because we are not financing it properly. All we are doing is foisting further and further schemes on them without giving them the funding to resource the people who need to deliver these schemes. They are all good schemes. The Croí Cónaithe scheme brought in by the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, is a great scheme. It is something we in the Regional Group of Independents have been advocating for for a long time. It is now in place but the resources in the local authorities are not there to actually deliver on it.

We are going to face perhaps €5 billion in costs for remediation of our housing stock and all that is going on there. We are talking about how we are going to do it and a levy on concrete products and all of that. However, we have missed out on how to ensure it does not happen again. We need to have a proper building control system in this country. We have the regulations, we have all the legislation, maybe too much, and we have all the certification but we have nobody dealing with building control. When I asked the Minister's office lately the number of building control officers in the country he did not know and I was told I would have to go back to each local authority to find out. In Galway there is probably one officer, or maybe one and a half, doing building control. If we are serious about not having another epidemic of problems within the construction industry going down the road and billions more of taxpayers' money having to be spent, now is the time to put it right. Now is the time to put the building control in place. Now is the time to concentrate on ensuring it does not happen again. We must of course deal with the legacy issues we have; they need to be addressed.

Regional development has been mentioned as an aspiration, a vision or whatever.

We need to deliver on it. In the last Government, I was lucky to have been involved in the development of broadband. I want to acknowledge the work of Deputies Bruton and Naughten, who worked with the Taoiseach and the Government in bringing it forward. It is taking a long time to deliver it. We need to fast track that for the regions.

In respect of transport, we talk about the difficulties in delivering things. One of my pet subjects is phases 2 and 3 of the western rail corridor. No planning permission or consent is required. Like the line that is being built between Limerick and Foynes, it can be done quickly. We do not need a Government in place in Northern Ireland for us to decide to build a railway line which will serve the western region to Foynes and Waterford. There are a lot of issues like that. We have the ingredients to put them right, but we need a solid implementation plan.

I think about the likes of the National Building Agency, which was established at a time we were building huge numbers of social housing. It built, took control of and programmed houses. It dealt with procurement, construction and certification. Housing was built to the highest standards. We need to peel back a lot of the layers we have built up, get back into the trenches and start building houses again. Local authorities have a key role in their reserve to help us do that around the country. We need to finance them to make sure they have the resources to deliver what we want them to deliver. We have an opportunity to have a great country again. We have problems, namely, housing and health.

Yesterday I met one of the Ukrainians who has come to this country, who is now working and delighted to be here. They have two daughters in school and everything is going great for them. However, at the start of the war we estimated we would take in 100,000 Ukrainians this year. When we reached 65,000, we were under so much pressure we did not know what to do. We need to do more planning in respect of emergency accommodation. We need to cut out the layers of bureaucracy so that we can get things done quickly. We have to bring in as many Ukrainians as need to come here. I know Ukrainians who are working all over the place, and we need them to work here. However, it is time to pull back the layers, be courageous and do some of the work immediately so that we can deliver as quickly as possible.

See this speech in context