Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

While I mentioned Corofin, some 30 towns and villages in County Galway are earmarked for wastewater development. At the same time, we are creating restrictions in respect of rural housing. We are telling people they cannot live in the rural areas and telling them to move into the towns and villages. Houses cannot be built there and the urgency is not there. Craughwell in County Galway was allocated funding for a wastewater treatment plant last year. It will probably be another five to six years before this is delivered. That is the reality. The processes we are using are completely out of sync with the housing emergency. We need to see this for what it is. It is an economic-social problem whereby we cannot build houses where they are needed.

Construction has not yet commenced on 50,000 units for which planning permission was obtained last year. Something is going wrong. The private housing market is completely dysfunctional. We need to reduce costs.

We can do this without costing money by looking outside the box and getting more land zoned. Let us tweak the affordable housing scheme. It is a fine scheme and it could work in a lot more areas.

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