Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I, too, am happy to contribute to the debate. I thank the officials in Tipperary County Council, formerly South Tipperary County Council, and a wonderful, outstanding council official, Mr. Sean Lonergan, who is retiring after decades of service to the council and the people of County Tipperary. He is an outstanding public servant with great ideas, vision and passion. Unfortunately, he did not always get the support he needed.

We are listening to all these figures. It is a game of Punch and Judy over and back between Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil. I am sick, sore and tired of listening to all this about houses being built. We built houses from the forties to the nineties and afterwards, and we had none of this show and spin. There is a great old recitation my daughter used to recite at Scór, called "Maybe that is the way I am" or similar, and the Shelbourne Hotel was mentioned, but this is pure comedy. The facts are that 90% of the apartments built last year in Dublin city were sold off to vulture funds and big organisations. That is the problem.

After the collapse, the Government and former Deputy Michael Noonan said we needed vulture funds. I know that these funds were a necessary part of our recovery. However, the Government, including Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and now the Green Party, are in hock to all these big businesses, big real estate investment trusts, REITs, and big companies that are buying up all the units, and not the ordinary people. They have forgotten about daoine na hÉireann, na daoine beaga and na daoine aosta. They have forgotten about them completely. The Government is now subservient to CRH. It put on a levy to deal with mica and pyrite because it was CRH that supplied the faulty concrete, but that company cannot be penalised because the Government is totally in hock to it. It cannot penalise CRH but it penalises ordinary people by driving up the cost of building. There is all the Government's folderol with the so-called BER rating and the whole lot, including insulation, and the cost of oil. The price of oil was increased and then the Government put on a carbon tax.

It is backwards the Government is going instead of forwards. While it is in hock to big development and big business, we will not get houses for the Irish people. I know dozens of couples, as do my colleagues, as they said, in rural Ireland who have the wherewithal, the site, and the vision to house themselves, without asking the State for anything, but cannot get planning permission. Planning bungles on. We then have the whole mess of An Bord Pleanála. The Government has lost its way. Great visionaries, such as T.K. Whitaker, were here, but it has lost its way completely. It is time we had a whole new thinking. There is now spinning with this new report today, and bits of it have been selected going back and forward, but the Government has lost its way completely. It is in the pockets of big business.

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