Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

This is important legislation. It is to be welcomed that we will have a better standard of licensing of workers and tutors. We must be careful of overregulation of the construction sector as well, because it is a difficult enough one to try to recruit and get skilled labour into now. It takes a great deal of time. I am aware of companies in the past couple of years whose workers had to go for Safepass certification. These were people who had six, seven and eight years' experience of working on sites. They could not go onto a site until their Safepasses were updated and yet they could not get the Safepass module done because tutors were inundated. We must be careful, therefore, to ensure we have the capacity in the system to deal with the number of people in it. I would also like to see something in terms of, and perhaps the legislation will speak to this aspect, building materials and their examination in respect of safety. I have raised the standards affecting concrete specifically with the Minister previously. This issue has not been resolved this issue yet. It is still the responsibility of the local authorities. I wonder whether something can be built into the legislation whereby when the checks on safety and regulation are being done, materials could also be checked, especially the standard of building materials.

Beyond that, it is a fact of life that Ireland is going to have to build higher, generally, and in terms of our city builds and built infrastructure in particular. This poses advanced and significant questions for builders in respect of safety and training, especially concerning those people operating cranes, teleporters, forklifts and all those kinds of machines. This is an area where, as Deputy Canney said, we have had tragedies in the past. People have fallen down stairwells that were not properly guarded or in the context of guardrails on the edges of buildings. These aspects must be examined because they are the areas where most fatalities probably occur. After that, crush injuries probably come next, where materials are stacked and fall over or temporary walls fall over and this kind of occurrence.

There is a lot in this legislation, but it is important that we do not just create a body that will oversee and overregulate people to death when this is not doing what it is supposed to do, which is to improve the standards people are working under and improve the standard of our building output. This is what I would like to see. I hope there will be an opportunity for the legislation to cater to this element. For people who suffer at the hands of cowboy tradespeople, I also hope this legislation will in some way draw a line under that practice and people will now be able to ask properly for people's credentials upfront.

We need to make construction and the trades workable employment for people in future. Heretofore, it was the case that people would work in Ireland for a year or two and then when things became slack, they would go off to America or Australia. We now have a significant volume of pent-up demand and there is a long-term career for people in this sector, but they must be able to see it and gain a certain status from it.

I hope having trade qualifications which people can show upfront and allow them to describe themselves as certified in whatever they are doing will enable them to get a better rate of compensation and keep them in the industry for longer.

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