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

I do not want to delay this Bill any further. I understand it needs to be passed notwithstanding the debates we might have about it. It is a little bit odd that anybody would oppose it because this is money we have to have spent to keep the show on the road. We might want to spend it differently or spend more but we need this money to cover the costs of public services and so on that carried us through this year. I understand that the committees scrutinise stuff but not everything is scrutinised as forensically as it should be. It is appropriate to use this last opportunity to question certain things about whether a proper cost-benefit analysis has been done of whether the money is being spent in the best way possible to deliver the outcomes we want, whether the expenditure has achieved the objectives we desire or whether there might be better ways of spending the same money and getting better results. I would hope any government would be open to thinking about those things.

On sports, I did not say €24 million was lost. I think another Deputy used the phrase "it is going back" or whatever it was. I did not use that phrase. My point is that €24 million is a lot of money when I know a lot of clubs are looking for stuff and in many cases are not getting it. It is an opportunity to highlight that it would be a good investment to have a more proactive approach when it comes to supporting sports in the community. I have said before that there is often a bit of a “computer says no” approach when clubs go looking for money. If you do not tick certain boxes, they say no or reasons are found to say no. Reasons should be found to say yes when it comes to providing money for community-based grassroots sports clubs looking for more facilities. It is obvious, particularly given the growth in the participation of girls and women in sports, which has grown exponentially and is fantastic, that there is a big catch-up to be done in the necessary facilities. Even before we had a high level of women’s participation in sport, a lot of the sports facilities were pretty awful. When I played soccer and GAA, I changed in containers on the side of fields. There is still quite a lot of that going on. Given that large numbers of women are getting involved in sport, decent quality facilities are required. We should have them anyway but it becomes ever more important. There needs to be a more proactive approach to giving the necessary funding to provide the best quality facilities for grassroots sports, which are often severely lacking. I mark that as an important issue that should be prioritised.

I will not go on – we will debate it over the next while. There has not really been a cost-benefit analysis. While the Minister responded and I do not necessarily agree with him on some of the points I made, he is not fully responding. A breakdown that was produced by the Department of housing came out in September - in fairness, it was not the Minister’s Department - and it makes for interesting reading. If one looks at the breakdown of the cost of construction of a house, including all the different things, one will see that almost every stage involves people brought into the process from the outside. Of course, there will be contractors and private businesses. I do not suggest they will not always play a role in the construction of housing and many other things, but when we need to build the amount of housing we now have to build and when we have the deficit that we do, we have to be able to do this on scale. Even people who are very middle of the road and a long way from me ideologically and politically say that our private construction industry does not have the capacity. We will have to grasp that nettle. We must have construction companies that have the scale to build tens of thousands of houses and those houses most be affordable.

Part of the reason for the last crash was that even when we got up to 70,000 to 90,000 houses a year, they were delivered at astronomical prices. Banks were lending money to people who could not really afford to buy at those prices and eventually the whole pack of cards came crashing down. We had better not go down that road again but we could because the prices I quoted in that document are not sustainable. To be talking about €450,000 to build a house, €550,000 to build an apartment and €590,000 to build an apartment in the city is not sustainable. We have to find a way to drive down the price of constructing housing. If there is a company of scale, there are economies of scale. The Minister surely knows this as somebody who was the Minister for Finance. I did economics for the leaving certificate, so I know about economies of scale. That is why a cost-benefit analysis at least needs to be done to see if the costs could be driven down. There is a labour shortage, which we clearly have at the moment. When we look at the money expended on trying to recruit, find and train people, we should look at models like the ESB, which in its heyday had a large number of apprentices trained. It was an attractive job. Our electricity infrastructure could not operate on a boom-slump basis, could it? It could not, but our construction sector operators on a boom-slump basis.

We had many construction workers in 2008 but then numbers slumped and we are having a real battle to get people back into construction, partly because of the bitter memory of what happened the last time. We have to make it attractive again. There are many reasons to look very seriously - it is an urgent necessity and we should not be flippant about it - at whether this is an absolute necessity in order to deliver housing at affordable levels and the infrastructure we need to address the major problems facing this country.

This is my very last point and it may be the last chance I will get to say it before the Dáil rises. It is in this Bill and it is about out-turns. I have raised it with the Minister many times. It relates to the problem of the public money that I want to be spent in the area of art and culture, particularly in the film industry sector, but which is still not delivering on the industry development test. It is not delivering the income and employment security the crews deserve and need and that the actors, writers and performers in film and our creative sector deserve.

I was looking yesterday at interesting figures from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, on average salaries in different areas of the economy. The second lowest is €16,000 a year, for people working in the arts. Most people work in the arts are on an average of €16,000. It is a miserable salary. It is poverty income. It is pretty terrible for a country whose reputation, to a very significant extent, depends on our fantastic literary, cultural and artistic heritage that most of the people who work in that area exist on very low incomes and have a very precarious employment situation. We could be doing better. Irish Equity, the Writers Guild of Ireland and the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland have been saying that the Government may be putting money into this area and want to develop the industry, but the money we put into this industry is supposed to be conditional on industry development and one cannot have industry development if the people who are the core of that industry have absolutely no security whatsoever. Many of these creative people just leave and ask what the point is in being a writer, performer or director when they have to put up with such precarity and incomes are so low. They have asked that the public money that goes into areas like film be much more strictly conditional on the producers meeting the industry development test. For them, that means guaranteeing they are not given crappy contracts where they are forced to sign away their right to future residuals, which all of these people used to get in the old days. They used to get residuals, often for the rest of their lives. They do not get them any more, but they are of critical importance when one is on that sort of low income and living that precarious existence.

It is similar for the crew. Again this week, more of these workers were in the Labour Court. They go in and then the film producer company to which the Minister gives money and which set up the designated activity company, DAC, for the films the crew worked on marches into the Labour Court and says it is not the workers' employer. It set up the DAC and received money from the Government to make this film on the basis that it was going to create quality employment and training but then says the workers are not its employees, even though it is obvious that it is the employer because there is nobody else. It got the money from the State. I just do not believe it is fair to do that. I point out to the Minister that many of those people live in his constituency and they have been blacklisted out of the industry because they asserted their right to the recognition of their service for many years. The Government should do something about that. It would not take much. The Government can just tell the film producers to stop doing this and that it will not give them the money unless they recognise the service of the people who are in that industry, acknowledge that they are the employers and stop hiding behind the DAC. The Government should make that change. It would be good for the development of the industry as well as for the people who work in it.

I am all for the expenditure that has been allocated, and for more in that area, but the Minister should make it conditional on giving decent employment, conditions and rights to the people who work in the cultural, arts and film sectors.

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