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

I wish to take the Taoiseach up on something he said about the State most likely being slower than the private sector regarding retrofitting and the construction of social housing, for example. On the construction of social housing, there is a PPP being developed across three local authority areas to build a relatively small number of social housing units. In the four-year timeline given by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, which was involved in two of the PPPs, by far the biggest time lag in the delivery of social housing was associated with the tendering process concerning private contractors. In fact, Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Services has said procurement issues to do with going to the private sector are a major problem, far bigger than Part 8 planning or anything like that, which takes only a few weeks. I put it to the Taoiseach that the opposite of what he said is the truth. In other words, the tendering process involving private contractors, the competition related to those contractors and the possibility that they will go out of business, which happens very regularly, comprise the major factor delaying the delivery of public projects, whether they involve building houses or retrofitting houses. If we had our own directly employed labour force with the requisite skills and professions, we could send people out directly to do the work.

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