Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

This deserves a longer debate but let us at least start the debate. If labour, which is in short supply, is busy building a private development that will cost €3,000 in rent per month, it means the short-supply labour is not building the public and affordable housing. That is what it means in reality when we do not have enough construction workers. We are getting investor-led, profit-driven, unaffordable development that nurses and teachers - all the workers we need - cannot afford, not even the workers who build it. There is an opportunity cost there because it means these workers are not building the public and affordable housing we actually need for nurses, teacher and others, so that they can afford to live in Dublin or the big urban centres and, therefore, work in our health service. I stand over that argument. The Celtic tiger proves it. We had record housing output that nobody could afford and the economy went over a cliff as a result.

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